Indiana’s DEI Law

“underrepresented” students are the ones who scream racial slurs for four hours a day at anyone less white than tilda swinton – when was the last time you met one on a college campus? wednesday? okay, when was the last time you met two on a college campus?

“overrepresented” students are trans; after all, trans people are such a small percentage of the population that if you multiply it out, no trans person should ever be allowed to attend a college, or be within five hundred feet of one.

there are no “persuadable critics” on these points because they have no interest in intellectual diversity, they only have an interest in crushing the enemies of white american christian nationalism, and, of course, the queers. pretending they have a genuine interest in anything short of that is a mug’s game. hard pass from me

This law is, very obviously, a dogwhistle and not worth addressing as anything other than a dogwhistle. Why do the bigots’ work for them by maintaining the pretence that it’s anything else?

We had a kind of scuffle about this in Wisconsin recently: the Republican Party here is basically led by anti-Trumpists (who are not never-Trumpists) and who took up anti-DEI partly as a way of trying to ingratiate themselves with DeSantis when he was a possible nominee. They kind of lost interest when he crashed, and we ended up with a reasonably benign compromise (which our Regents then rejected for their own reasons, and then reversed themselves when they realised that they had kicked the brand new Chancellor of our campus and President of the system in the teeth).

It’s really unhealthy for our teaching that the faculty are so politically and religiously undiverse. It’s probably much more unhealthy for our teaching that our faculty don’t learn how to teach, aren’t given much incentive to improve and lack an infrastructure for improving. I worry much less about indoctrination (there’s not much evidence that many professors want to indoctrinate, and even less that they succeed) than about alienation; it’s just so a shitty experience to be in a class in which your professor, who doesn’t know any Christians, says all Christians are racist or selfish, or if you are the only kid in the class wearing a hijab and your professor explains that the only reason Muslim women wear hijabs is sexism, or if your professor repeatedly makes jokes about political figures you or your family vote for assuming that the whole class shares his political views. Or your professor, who seemed to recognize you were smart and engaged student suddenly stops talking to you the day you first turn up in ROTC uniform. And, of course, the liberal student who has never had a political discussion with anyone who disagrees with her (if she’s reading she knows who she is! — well, all these students will recognize themselves) she came to college is unlikely to have such a discussion in classrooms like that. And a few experiences like that just shuts those students down even in other classes. It always takes a while for conservative students to trust that I really mean it that I want the full range of reasonable views to be present in our classroom discussions; and I’m disappointed how many students whose contributions are deeply appreciated by their classmates have some crappy experience that they’ll tell me in private.

The idea that a public university shouldn’t be intellectually and politically diverse is pretty odd. So. Yes we should reject the premise, quite loudly. And mean it.

I don’t know whether the atmosphere now reportedly prevailing at elite U.S. universities, both private and public, is representative of what’s going on in universities generally. With that caveat, I have a somewhat personal comment. Also, please don’t take this as an everything-was-better-in-the-old-days comment, because everything was not better in the old days, and only a jerk would think that.

In the late 1970s I was an undergraduate at the institution where Gina Schouten is now a professor. My political views were well to the left of center, as were those of many (though not all) of the students I knew (and no doubt many of the professors and other instructors were somewhere to the left of center as well, though I think a fair number of them either hovered around the center or didn’t care about politics). However, I never had the sense that there was a prevailing orthodoxy capital O, and it would never have crossed my mind to exercise self-censorship in a class discussion. (And as best I could tell, it never crossed anyone else’s mind either, although I’m sure that’s an overstatement and I can’t put myself in anyone else’s head.) I remember spending a certain amount of time — especially, though not only, outside of class — in intellectual and political arguments. It was viewed as normal, and part of what you were in college to do.

By contrast, a letter published in the March-April 2024 issue of Harvard Magazine opens by noting: “Last year, in a survey completed by 98 percent of Harvard seniors, only 37 percent reported that they were comfortable discussing controversial subjects in class.” This suggests that to the extent there is an intellectual diversity problem, at least at this particular institution, it’s coming more from the bottom up than the top down, i.e., that the problem is not “indoctrination,” which I strongly suspect is largely a figment of the Right’s imagination, but one of a culture of self-censorship, for lack of a better phrase.

Assuming this is at least part of the problem, I don’t know what the solutions are, but I think the OP, in the second-to-last paragraph, is asking some of the right questions.

@Gina Schouten (5)

You may well have a broader view than I do of what is worth introducing students to. :-) My reactions are also definitely affected by Wisconsin’s latest flavor of this nonsense, which is a deal reached by our Board of Regents and members of the state legislature this past December and which includes the following gem:

“UW-Madison will seek philanthropic support to create an endowed chair to focus on conservative political thought, classical economic theory, or classical liberalism, depending on the donor’s interest, conducting a national search to fill the position.”

So you can I hope see why my comment about current US Republican policy didn’t feel like that much of a leap for me.

Also, given what current US Republican policy is, I don’t actually have a problem with students knowing I think its planks are evil. My students already know I’m trans and that I think I have a right to exist. I’ve talked to them about COVID policy. I don’t bring fascism up in class more because I don’t think it would be helpful for me to do so than because I think it would be ethically wrong to do so. I don’t connect the dots for them to Republican policy planks, but again this is because I think it would be ineffective for me to do so, not because I think it would be wrong to do so.

I respect your intent. Students (ordinarily) should not need to worry that we or their classmates will regard their moral or political priors as despicable or beneath engagement.

But please consider that we have some students who hold stances that ARE despicable. If convincing someone through patience and compassion is not available (which IMO can be the case for stances someone did not think their way into in the first place), I hope you will consider peer (and superior) pressure to be a valid break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option.

“Also, please don’t take this as an everything-was-better-in-the-old-days comment…”

I went to college in the early 80s in the UK, where things were very different from how they are here now. My friends were politically all over the place, and so were their friends. I know plenty of students of whom that isn’t close to true. But maybe that was true then and I didn’t know it!

The UW system did a similar but much more detailed survey recently, with a much lower response rate, and my impression from that, and from talking to numerous students, left and right, is very much in line with what LFC says: there’s a really big problem of self-censorship, and it isn’t just conservative students, but students across the political spectrum, and they are more afraid of each other than of their professors. This is in line with my diagnosis that there’s a big problem of teacher skill (but, of course, everything is evidence for what I believe is true!!). In the prevailing environment it takes work and skill for a teacher to create an environment sufficiently trusting that people can say what they are thinking and hear what others are saying, interpret one another charitably, and know that they will be interpreted charitably.

I looked around at one point, and couldn’t find any surveys about this sort of stuff from more than 5 years ago, so, again, for all I know it was ever thus! (If so, that completely defies my experience and the testimony of everyone I know who has been teaching for a long time, but it would be nice to have survey data).

J-D: so you do agree with the value the conservatives (and Gina) are endorsing, you just don’t believe that conservatives actually believe in it? (And, I presume you are only accusing conservative politicians and thought leaders of bad faith, not all people with conservative political views).

I won’t comment on Indiana because I don’t know anything about it, and a lot depends on just how you would want to deal with right wing politicians, tactically.

That said, my experience is that, on the left, a big shift happened when the “cultural turn” took over a lot of departments and classrooms. Old time lefties, like me, were happy with intellectual diversity because we believed that the injustices of the world were mostly due to economic and social structures, and there would be a lot of cultural/intellectual twisting and turning on the way to dealing with them. (And maybe our analysis of it was not quite right, and folks who disagreed with us would be helpful in pointing it out.)

Then along came the cultural turn. The sins of the world were traceable to people having bad thought structures. The goal of education became deconstructing those evil ways of thinking and replacing them with good ways. Not surprisingly, there was less room for intellectual diversity.

Now, I don’t think for a moment that any faction of the left has a monopoly on intolerance. Maybe there’s less visible right wing intolerance in academia because much of it is too dumb to get through the gates. But we should own the part of the problem that’s ours.

Harry @13
Appreciate the comment, esp as you are in contact with students all the time and thus much closer to the situation than I am. I just want to clarify my opening remark: what I meant was banal, i.e. that some things were better in “the old days” but other things were not (e.g., campuses are much more welcoming places now for members of sexual and racial minorities, which is good, but this development has been accompanied by other things that are less good, e.g. the problems being discussed in this thread).

Ok, I’ll bite: what does “diversity” mean?

The post echoes the language of the Indiana law in calling for “variety”. Cambridge Dictionary says it’s about the number of different types of things:

the fact of many different types of things or people being included in something; a range of different things or people

This seems to imply that a student population with 99% WASPs and 1% containing a multitude of minority ethnicities would be more “diverse” than one with 40% minority population with a slightly smaller number of distinct ethnicities. Likewise gender “diversity” on boardrooms works be satisfied if there was one woman (or non-binary person) on every board. I don’t think that’s what people mean.

I think in practice they’re using (or abusing) the word to mean something more like representation: a population whose proportions approximate wider society’s.

Moving to the “intellectual” sense, the literal meaning of diversity would entail that if a university had Trotskyists, Maoists, Critical Theorists and Neo-Marxists on the faculty it would be “diverse” but I don’t think what critics mean.

The representational use of diversity applied to intellectual matters seems inimical to free inquiry and forces universities to conform to the prejudices of wider society when they should be doing the opposite, especially in a country like US.

Just to clarify: I agree with LFC et al that there is a problem now (in US), I just don’t think “intellectual diversity” is the right way to conceptualise it. Also agree with LFC that it comes from outside: universities are being made to conform with the values of consumer capitalism and the practices of the corporate world, of whose human value-chain they are now a primary, relatively low-profit stage.

If people harbour a desire to discuss the subject of whether people like me should be dispossessed… I want them to feel uncomfortable

Are you a landlord by any chance?

“Diversity between institutions” (Matt) is an almost diametrically opposed agenda to “diversity within institutions” (which Indiana and Gina seem to advocate) it seems to me. I think this points to a rather general contradiction within “diversity” advocacy: if you want the restaurant scene in Madrid to resemble lower Manhattan then the distinctiveness of dining in Madrid vs Manhattan will inevitably attenuate.

From Indiana’s House Bill 1040

Provides that a school corporation or qualified school may not provide instruction that socialism, Marxism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are compatible with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded

May I be permitted to express just a quantum of skepticism that a political system that sought to prevent such ideas being discussed is genuinely concerned about ensuring a diversity of views? I might take the calls from conservatives for intellectual diversity a little more seriously if they seemed to demonstrate a genuine commitment to the principle – yet, much like many previous controversies (free speech, abortion, civil rights, etc. etc. etc.), the people with such deep-rooted and sincere convictions mysteriously find themselves busy when conservatives are the violators (often with far more institutional power behind them). Of course, not being in academia myself, perhaps I am being unfair – maybe there are indeed swathes of conservatives outraged that there isn’t more communist discourse in their business studies electives, revolted by Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist, or even tearing their hair out that Leadership Institute is only dedicated to ensuring a conservative group on every campus as opposed to mandating a diverse set of views. Perhaps those within the US academic system might enlighten me?

However, setting aside the politics of it all, what about seeking intellectual diversity purely because it is a good thing in and of itself?

Well, a lot depends on what is being promulgated and how, no? If your position is anything other than absolute free-speech (e.g. anyone should be able to demand their opinions be heard – regardless of how harmful, demonstrably false, or irrelevant they may be – regardless of the time, place, circumstances, and whether or not anyone wants to hear them), then you already agree that there should be boundaries – you are just arguing about where they should be. Harry wrote “I want the full range of reasonable views to be present in our classroom discussions”, which is certainly a sentiment that can be applauded – but then this immediately opens the question as to what counts as reasonable (and who makes that determination).

Are students self-censoring? I’ve no doubt they are (indeed, pretty much anyone who isn’t going about their day constantly vocalising their stream-of-consciousness must be to at least some extent). But that doesn’t tell me whether or not their self-censorship is based on an accurate assessment of the potential repercussions (need I point out that the actual rate of crime and the reported fear of crime do not necessarily correlate?). It doesn’t tell me whether this is because universities are unable to promulgate an intellectually diverse culture, or if it is just that people who are spending non-trivial amounts of money would prefer if their time isn’t taken up with listening to “I’m not against X, it is just that [insert tired argument heard one billion times before]”. It certainly doesn’t tell me if this is because radical left wing people are indeed fostering an intolerant culture against conservatives, or if it is just that declaring you hold ideals which are detrimental to others has the unfortunate side-effect that people will tend to treat you as if you hold ideals which are detrimental to others. And it really doesn’t tell me to what degree the problem, if indeed problem there is, is actually prevalent. Oddly enough, such concerns don’t seem to plague conservative establishments (c.f. The University of Austin, Prager University, etc.), but of course one cannot expect reciprocation in such matters.

[As a side note, interestingly – despite apparently being part of the evil woke mob who are oh so intolerant – I have never argued that conservatives should, purely on the basis of being conservatives, be unable to marry, adopt children, access healthcare, express affection to their partner in public, be unable to become an educator, forbidden from joining the military, be unable to use public bathrooms, be unable to protest, demonstrate, lobby, or argue in ways that I would not apply equally to all other people – and yet, these are all things which I, and/or friends and family, have been prevented from (both de facto and often de jure) under policies advocated for and supported by conservatives during my lifetime.]

It is certainly true that I don’t think it should be the case that a conservative could be castigated by their professor for their political views in an unprovoked showing of contempt (or a Christian for their religious beliefs, or a member of the ROTC for their military allegiances, etc.). But dare I suggest that it should equally not be the case that a professor publicly declares their belief that black people are intellectually inferior, or that trans people are delusional, or that a woman is kind of like a Ford pickup truck: built to take a pounding. To me this has little to do with ensuring an intellectually diverse environment, and more to do with the minimal professional competence one should expect from anyone in a position of authority. This is not to say that abuses do not happen, but that it seems to be less because there is “the wrong atmosphere” and more because universities have a hierarchical structure which frequently tolerates abuse so long as the abusers have sufficient clout. Given that, sans interference (which would be somewhat less than ideal given that it would likely be undertaken by political partisans, as in the case outlined by the OP), any enforcement or regulation will likely fall to this hierarchy itself, may I express just a little cynicism as to how likely it is to be applied equally?

But what of the students themselves? It is tempting to point out that the supreme court is poised to overturn abortion rights (despite the majority of Americans believing it should be a decision between doctor and patient), and suggest that if conservatives are concerned that they might be snubbed in the lunch-queue while left-wingers are concerned they could lose bodily autonomy on pain of imprisonment or even death, there might perhaps be a little bit of disparity in power and outcome here, and that hauling oneself over the coals for not sufficiently protecting the feelings of people who typically dominate the social, cultural, political, and economic landscapes might be just a little bit of an odd priority. However, far be it from me to suggest that university professors might wish to prioritise consideration as to exactly how they are going to support their non-conservative students.

Instead, let me express my view that I’m not entirely sure how, outside the classroom, one is going to ensure intellectual diversity without pretty draconian enforcement. At which point, one again encounters the thorny issues of how to balance an intellectually diverse environment with people expressing their freedom of association. I must confess that I am unwilling to spend time in the company of people who express the belief that people like me should be treated as subhuman (even if they are doing so politely, and are “kindly” making an exception for me as “one of the good ones”). Presumably such horrific behaviour is precisely the problem, and should have seen me expelled, tarred, feathered, and possibly summarily executed.

But what of the scenario which seems to be presented here – that there is a thoughtful conservative, who doesn’t support extreme positions (such as the majority of the Republican political platform), but does wish to express their entirely reasonable yet somehow still unpopular views without having to worry about social isolation? Certainly, by all means, people should do their best to ensure such a hypothetical student may thrive in the university environment. But if the university is committed to ensuring that there are safe spaces for conservatives, perhaps conservatives could reciprocate – or is that too much to ask?

“When I was thinking about going/preparing to go to college, lots of really well meaning friends and family warned me that expressing conservative views (which they thought I shared, and which I did share to some degree then) wouldn’t win me any friends at college.”

Exactly what views are we talking about here?

J-D @14 makes excellent sense.

Regarding the question of what diversity is, one of the oddest takes I have ever seen is how the term is used in official language here in Australia. In surveys I am asked if I am “culturally diverse”. What they mean with this is if my first language is anything other than English, and if I am descended from anybody but British immigrants. The answer to that is yes, but all my ancestors for hundreds of years were Germans, so I am anything but “diverse”, and I always flinch when selecting that response. The way they use that term is just bizarre.

Matt,

I am deeply skeptical of religious communities or social classes sequestering themselves away from everybody else in special private schools. Mixing everybody up and getting to know each other seems more likely to build a functional society.

engels @29 wrote:

The elephant in the room in this discussion would appear to be the eminent university presidents who recently got fired for permitting legitimate on-campus protest against the ongoing genocide the US has been complicit in for the last six months. Perhaps that’s what Indiana’s “free inquiry” Republicans are concerned about?

No university presidents were fired for the reason engels cites. Magill was fired in effect for accepting Elise Stefanik’s absurd gotcha premise that a chant such as “globalize the intifada” is tantamount to a call for genocide. During the questioning, C. Gay also accepted that premise, which led (as in Magill’s case) to a not-very-good answer, but what got Gay fired were the cumulative plagiarism allegations. And the third university president (MIT’s president) who testified that day was not fired.

But if you spend time at Harvard, or at Madison, or at Milwaukee, and actually talk to students, you find that they have no desire to discuss that, or say any such thing.

I have not had the opportunity to spend time talking to students at Harvard, or Madison, or Milwaukee, and I never will, and in this I must be typical of people reading Crooked Timber and, equally relevantly, typical of the people who see a report of the survey of Harvard seniors which was being cited. (Also, is it unreasonable of me to suspect that if there are students at Harvard who do want to discuss the kind of thing I mentioned in my previous comment, they won’t be telling you (Harry)?)

They are anxious about … asking at what point that fetus has the kind of moral standing that make it wrong to kill it, …

If people are hesitant about releasing that form of words into a classroom full of people they don’t know, that’s a good thing. They should be so hesitant, for reasons I can dilate on if desired.

… a culture of self-censorship, for lack of a better phrase. … the pedagogical problem of self-censorship …

Nearly everybody does self-censor, and everybody should self-censor. Disinhibition is pathological.

I also find, anecdotally, that the students I know who self-censor are disproportionately first generation and disproportionately working class.

Maybe this is not an indicator that they should self-censor less but rather an indicator that the rich and privileged should self-censor more?

And some self-censorship is really about fearing that they will inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings by saying something that will be misinterpreted (an admirable motivation).

Just so.

… the political problem of conservatives mistrusting higher education …

Conservatives mistrust higher education not because of something wrong with higher education but because of something wrong with conservatives.

J-D @35

blockquoteNearly everybody does self-censor, and everybody should self-censor. Disinhibition is pathological.

Are you serious? Are you really incapable of distinguishing between (1) someone who walks down Main Street shouting at the top of their lungs or, more realistically perhaps, someone who meets another person for the first time at a party and says immediately “I hate what you’re wearing,” and (2) a student who has an opinion that bears on a topic of classroom discussion and decides not to voice it because she’s afraid someone might react strongly to it?

Your example of a student who wants to discuss whether “people like me [J-D]” (whatever that means here) “should be dispossessed, beaten, mutilated, and driven from the country” is bizarre, to put it mildly. Would a class discussion ever revolve around the proposition: So-and-so should be mutilated, or drawn-and-quartered, because [fill in the blank]?

Consider this thread, J-D. Is anyone here self-censoring, in the relevant sense of the phrase? Almost certainly not. You’re saying whatever you want, within the bounds of the blog’s comment policy, and so is everyone else. And yet for some reason you seem eager to defend the proposition that students engaged in a liberal-arts education — where part of the point is to expose them to different views and increase their ability to see things from different perspectives and also hone their ability to defend their own views and (importantly) reflect on them — should not feel perfectly free to say, within the basic limits of decorum, whatever they want.

J-D — you seem to think that our universities are riddled with kids who are closet genocidal fascists. There’s even less evidence for that than for the thought that they are riddled with kids who are in the grip of Marxism. It’s absolutely right that, with all due respect to them, posh people don’t like to be contradicted, and there’s some of that at the Ivies plus (and in some Law Schools, like Stanford), but really not much even at Madison. And anyway, part of our job (as teachers of philosophy, sociology, political science, maybe not chemistry or physics) is to teach them how to listen to and take seriously people who contradict them.

“If people are hesitant about releasing that form of words into a classroom full of people they don’t know, that’s a good thing. They should be so hesitant, for reasons I can dilate on if desired.”

I can’t tell whether you have a problem with the idea that at some point the fetus might have the kind of moral status that makes it wrong to kill it, or just more generally you think that people should be inhibited from raising any kind of reasonable but controversial moral question. Either way, the thing is: we can’t do our job if someone isn’t willing to ask that question (or other reasonable but controversial moral questions) and unless a good number of people in the room can be made to feel at ease discussing it thoughtfully and with confidence that when they say something wrong, or even that someone else mishears as wrong, they won’t be taken to task. They need to know that others will not be hypervigilant. It takes a lot of skill to create the right kind of environment. And in our particular polarized circumstances it takes even more (less here than at the Ivies, I think, so it’s a good thing that Gina is more skilled than I am, which I assure you she is).

Harry, if the statements set out in the legislation were part of a guide to universities to promote free expression, they would be unobjectionable. But this seems to me like giving a charitable reading to people who say things like “All lives matter” and “It’s OK to be white”. Read in isolation, they are unobjectionable, but we all know what they actually mean.

In this case, we don’t even need to read between the lines. As noted by Anna m @25 The legislation specifically excludes teaching favorable to “socialism, Marxism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems” Similar bans have applied “critical race theory” and so on

Thanks to Harry for the response and to Gina for the clarifying remarks.

From what you’ve both said, I think there are two separate points to consider:

1) From a political/strategic perspective, does it make sense for US academics to publicly state there are problems within academia, but they have a firm commitment to improving genuine intellectual diversity in order to convince people who are otherwise skeptical?

2) Separate from any political considerations, how can US academics ensure that universities are in environment in which “reasonable people” can thoughtfully discuss topics, no matter how controversial, within sensible boundaries in a manner that allows for respectful disagreement without fear of repercussion.

Point 1 is not particularly relevant to what universities actually do, but boils down to whether or not US academics expressing sentiments like “actually there is a problem with intellectual diversity on campus, but we are committed to improving this” (or similar) be a good idea?

To me, no. Firstly, anyone operating in good faith but already skeptical about universities is unlikely to be convinced by what you say (if there is a genuine commitment, this will be shown by deeds – in which case words are irrelevant), and secondly all you are doing is offering nice soundbites for right-wing political agitators to take out of context.

I would hope that US academics are aware that, like it or not, they are part of the culture war. As such, it doesn’t matter if you are offering a thoughtful comment, it doesn’t matter how much good faith you are offering it in, and it really doesn’t matter what the reality is – everything you say and do is subject to being taking out of context and presented in the worst possible light by bad faith actors who want a monopoly on what is said and thought, and will happily seize any excuse to make that happen (see Christopher Rufo, Project Veritas, etc. etc. etc.).

As such, were it me, I would proceed with considerable caution – I don’t think academics, by and large, are used to playing these sorts of games, and I think trying to do so will be a losing proposition.

Point 2 relates to the actuality – ignoring the politics of it all, how can genuine intellectual diversity be ensured (regardless of what we are saying)?

I don’t think it can (at least, not completely). This is because I don’t think you are really fighting against university culture, but rather the conditioning of society as a whole.

While I am not familiar with the US education system, presuming it is like most others, in general (and this is admittedly a generalisation ignoring efforts of individual teachers, etc.) schools typically instill obedience over disruption, giving “correct answers” over argument and debate, and basically “conforming” over “standing out”. There are a number of reasons for this (class size making individual mentoring difficult-to-impossible, tensions over what schools are supposed to be for, that it is easier to mark people to a grade based on “right or wrong” rather than nuanced examination of reasoning, that many people prefer a system in which there are clear right-or-wrong answers, and so on), but importantly pressure exists to conform to the system or face penalisation (and frequently students are told these penalties can and will affect their future). Similarly, much of workplace culture is the same – with relatively low levels of worker protection it is risky to continually contradict your boss, or be seen as disruptive, or to continually argue and debate rather than just do what is expected of you.

Thus, it seems to me, you are in a position where you are trying to convince students that within this brief period (and, generally speaking, within this period only) all the values that have been instilled are reversed, and that being “disruptive” and “not giving the correct answer” are good things. Oh, and also, as a student you are getting into debt to attend this place, if you get it wrong you could be penalised (with anything from poor grades to expulsion), and all this will determine your future (what job you can get, how rapidly you will progress in your career, whether or not you will be able to get healthcare, etc. etc.).

It is, I would think, fairly self-evident why students might be reluctant to take a gamble here, and why those who are even more tied to the concept of class mobility (such as working-class people) would be even more cautious.

Thus, if you want to change this behaviour you have to change the system which incentivises it – and that means a far greater change than doing anything at university level. I think you would have to change the focus of non-higher education, how work within the US functions, and arguably the very foundations of the US being predicated on capitalist hierarchies. In a genuinely equal society, where there are no pressures to conform, where work is a fulfilling activity rather than a means to survive, and where all of society is intellectually diverse, then maybe you have a chance of achieving this.

This is not to say that efforts are meaningless or futile – people change and grow, and I’m sure that at an individual level promoting these concepts does make a difference to your students. But I think that students will not come in with the “intellectually diverse” principles until the system changes to promote it.

Anthropologically speaking, egalitarian societies tend to strongly reject argumentative people as conceited, even domineering. And epistemological skepticism is reactionary. It is hard to find arguments against the Dude’s “That’s like your opinion man.” If culture determines, then the conservatives must teach culture and if they’re not, then they’re being excluded. So mandating their inclusion seems logical.

As it happens, my personal feeling is that diversity of opinion about the value of groups of people is wholly unjustified, that no proposition based on correct facts and sound arguments has ever demonstrated that this or that group is superior/inferior (that’s “season to taste” apparently.) In that sense I’m not even clear on the value of diversity. Plus I’m not even sure DEI programs aren’t more about PR, rather like ESG, anyhow.

steven t johnson @45: “my personal feeling is that … no proposition based on correct facts and sound arguments has ever demonstrated that this or that group is superior/inferior.”

I can’t help feeling I must have misunderstood you here. Do you not feel that supporters of Donald Trump are in an important way inferior? Aztecs, Confederate supporters of slavery, Pol Pot’s followers?. Or do you mean racial group, but that hardly seems relevant to the argument.

I would agree that some of the DEI carryon is mostly about PR, but I think by no means all.

John Q @38,

That is one point, but also, if voters want university faculty to look like them ideologically, that is a voter problem, not a diversity in academia problem. It would be useful to make it clearer to such voters that (1) every profession attracts a certain kind of person and (2) every profession shapes the world view of (many of) its members through their experiences in it, with academia being merely one example. The idea that investment bankers, retail cashiers, or truck drivers should be a perfect mirror of the ideological, gender, and ethnic composition of the population at large would be equally silly.

Matt @42,

That is how I understood the argument I was responding to. Best I can tell, from the perspective of the customers, there are three reasons for going to a private school: buying your child a better education that poor people are excluded from; buying your child a status marker or a social network that poor people are excluded from; and sequestering your children away from the immoral world so that they do not get exposed to unbelievers, pagans, and heretics, which might lead to them realising that those are also merely normal, nice people like us.

The first two are inequality and also mean that those in power have no incentive to adequately fund the public education system, because they themselves will be well-off enough to send their own children to private school. The third is amazing if you want to breed sectarian divisions in your society, potentially one day leading to the kind of violence where people set fire to each other’s temples.

That is why if I were randomly made emperor of the world, I would immediately outlaw all private education. I never claimed to be liberal, of course.

Alex @49 100% agree. I omitted the irony alerts

Consider this thread, J-D. Is anyone here self-censoring, in the relevant sense of the phrase?

Well, what sense of the phrase do you think is relevant? If I have the impulse to write something in a comment and then decide not to write it, in what sense is that not self-censorship?

Harry, if the statements set out in the legislation were part of a guide to universities to promote free expression, they would be unobjectionable. But this seems to me like giving a charitable reading to people who say things like “All lives matter” and “It’s OK to be white”. Read in isolation, they are unobjectionable, but we all know what they actually mean.

Exactly! Context matters! And so–

I can’t tell whether you have a problem with the idea that at some point the fetus might have the kind of moral status that makes it wrong to kill it

–in context (the context being the current state of public affairs in the US), I think we should all understand what it means when somebody raises a question like that for discussion. Of course the words are not ‘I want to discuss whether we should terrorise people’, but that’s the effect. Why else would somebody want to discuss it? Of course, somebody who was actually pregnant and experiencing conflicting emotions about it might want to discuss their personal decision, but (again, context matters) not in any classroom I ever heard of. It is important that they should be able to find a suitable situation to discuss it, but a sociopolitical environment in which the wording Harry provided is commonly discussed in classrooms will not make that easier for them but rather the reverse.

@J-D 53
Of course the words are not ‘I want to discuss whether we should terrorise people’, but that’s the effect.

Do you mean that people who are anti-abortion want to terrorise people and thus are evil?
But this is true for any restrictive law. For example, people who are for gun control want to impose sanctions on gun owners, and those sanctions are supposed to terrorise gun owners into giving away their guns.
All forms of laws are to some degree restrictive, and enforce this restrictivity through potential violence.

It seems to me that you are so much anti-anti-abortion that you can’t accept the idea that someone could “reasonably” be anti abortion.

“Reasonably” is the key word here and the one that is difficult to discuss.

Will economists be denied tenure if they refuse to include Marxist perspectives in their teaching?

“UW-Madison will seek philanthropic support to create an endowed chair to focus on conservative political thought, classical economic theory, or classical liberalism, depending on the donor’s interest, conducting a national search to fill the position.”

This from a University is a declaration of academic and intellectual bankruptcy and I really really wonder how you Harry can pretend to believe that anybody promoting this sellout of Academia to political power cares about diversity.

These positions – and there are many of those in US academia – as you know very well, are not intended to foster critical scholarly research of conservatism but to provide well-paid positions for right wing pretend scholars who would not be hired under the normal rules of academic competition. In Colorado (https://www.colorado.edu/center/benson/CTP), they hired an actual fascist, John Eastman.

Of course if you believe that academia must represent the political landscape (an absurd belief), then you have to support hiring fascist professors. You have to support hiring professors who do not believe in learning, science and critical inquiry.

(Sorry previous comment got garbled).

Also this: „I would hope that US academics are aware that, like it or not, they are part of the culture war.“ (Anna M)

Potemkin meritocracy is pointedly offensive to those who claim the problem with DEI is that it is not meritocracy, a blessed state of affairs we already enjoy. DEI I sometimes fear is where the worst of the excluded, the ones reliably tested for blind fealty to the class system, are promoted to wrangle the lower orders of their particular persuasion. I could name names, but why dwell? Also, the general consensus here appears to be that class is irrelevant and thus the class system is not to be opposed

Stephen@47 “Do you not feel that supporters of Donald Trump are in an important way inferior? Aztecs, Confederate supporters of slavery, Pol Pot’s followers?. Or do you mean racial group, but that hardly seems relevant to the argument.” These are direct questions, so I will answer. The claim racial groups which overlaps into national, ethnic, language, religious and economic groups don’t seem relevant is entirely incorrect. Groups whose members can change their minds and join other groups are not the kinds of groups who are held to be inferior by nature.

Even the second question manages to confuse the Aztec empire and its flower wars with all the supposedly irrelevant groups. Confederate supporters of slavery and the Khmer Rouge are political parties which is the kind of group which genuinely borders on irrelevant. The reasons for that are, political parties are more self-selected than ascribed; the primary engine for professed adherence to political parties is conformism; much of what is called politics is ephemeral and irrelevant and such a collection of fads that absent cultivation by owners of media it’s not even clear to what extent the supposed adherents even know, much less are committed to, the policies and programs. Plus of course fandom (irrational by definition) seems to take over. But it is hard to justify accusing fans of Taylor Swift or the Chicago Cubs of being “inferior,” by any collection of correct facts and sound arguments….but now I’m repeating myself.

The real question of course is whether I think Trumpers are inferior in their whole persons, because their whole kind is inferior in some sense. I suspect Stephen has confused me with some LawyersGunsandMoney type. And the question is supposed to be read by those in the know as, Do I think bigotry is inherited and DNA commands that white people obsessively persecute Black people for fun and the satisfaction of their biological instincts? (No quotes, this is not Stephen’s literal words, which are quoted above.) The answer is no.

To the literal question, the answer is also a slightly qualified “no,” in air quotes because I distinguish between thoughtless conformists; victims of mass media who really think crime is exploding and so on; people who confuse personalities with programs and policies and imagine you can vote against something nebulous symbolized by one person by voting for another person, as against the political operatives, the money men, the hired guns from the think tanks, the local bigwigs, in short the true beneficiaries.
I do very much think of that groups most are liars and most are irrationalists by principle and most have cultivated a lack of empathy for the lower orders. I think irrationalism is wrong. But is that really the same thing as thinking their kind is inferior?

On the notion that of course a person can reasonably be for compulsory pregnancy. It is not reasonable to counterpose late term abortions. Most late term abortions are medical problems and we have already seen that laws against abortion intervene in the medical care of women, just as they were intended to. Even if for some reason though, a woman took the whim late in pregnancy to abort, it is astonishing anyone could argue that an unwanted child is a Moral Good, especially if the poor thing is punished by being forced on a hostile and unfit mother.

Besides, artificially restricting the issues for inflammatory effect is unreasonable. At a late state, Caesarean section comes into play as a method of terminating pregnancy, as it is intended to do. There are reasonable moral questions about when it would be unethical to perform a C-section. Forcing into existence a child doomed to terrible suffering if not death is morally questionable indeed. My guess is that whatever estimated period of fetal development permits a humane chance at survival after such delivery would be very much later than any compulsory pregnancy advocate wishes. I even suspect many of those people would be angry at the idea that a woman could choose a C-section ad lib, though obviously I can’t be sure.

Harry@62 It is unclear to me how Supreme Court decisions and laws passed by state legislatures and executive orders by governors can be deemed fringe positions. When I figure this out, I may respond.

Harry @ 60: “Really, you sound such a condescending and pompous git.
More forgivably, you don’t understand how hiring works at a major university in the US. Or politics. Anyway, we’re done.”

So instead of engaging with criticism, you respond with an insult and an ad hominem attack against the person making the criticism. This is kind of what I hoped you’d do, except you exceeded expectations. I take it that you actually think I should have “self-censored” my criticism. At least I should have been more polite. And perhaps you are right! But this is precisely what you have been denying above (re J-D et al). What you are doing here is indeed create a hostile atmosphere which makes it difficult for less privileged people like myself to express their views freely without fear of negative repercussions.

And despite your immature and insulting demeanor, Professor, I’m ready to continue this debate because I believe in “a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity”.

We were arguing about whether academics teaching Climate Change might be faced with negative repercussions of the new Indiana Law. And you claim that this would never happen because of “how hiring works at a major university”. Perhaps it won’t happen openly but what will definitely happen (and I can tell this because contrary to your assumption I do actually have years of experience with US academia) is that an assistant professor whose duty includes teaching Climate Change will be very careful how they express themselves, knowing that anything they say that right wing ideology disapproves of could lead to complaints and the need to justify themselves, and might endanger their tenure. This is especially true on more conservative campuses (of which there are many! Far more than Harvard than there are Harvards and Madisons), where many students have a conservative background and have been exposed to Climate Change denial all their lives as an article of faith. From the point of view of these students, and their parents, and the politicians they vote for, Climate Change denial clearly seems to be part of “scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline” .

So what is likely to happen is that the Assistant Professor will feel compelled to “present both sides”, and will feel compelled to refrain from accurately characterizing climate change denial as a politically motivated, academically bankrupt lie. They will, in the words that you yourself have used, exert “self-censorship”. This I think is obvious. To claim otherwise is naive at best. And if you disagree with that conclusion, Professor, you’ll have to do better than spewing insults.

“What you are doing here is indeed create a hostile atmosphere which makes it difficult for less privileged people like myself to express their views freely without fear of negative repercussions”

I think you are quite capable of dealing with an insult or two. Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it. People can judge for themselves, and they will.

“This is kind of what I hoped you’d do, except you exceeded expectations”

Odd to complain, then.

From the viewpoint of Republicans, climate change is an issue of scientific controversy in which only one side of the debate is being taught in colleges. The majority view (at least until recently) is that this imbalance is the result of a corrupt conspiracy to secure funding. Large-scale statements by supposed scientists opposing the mainstream view have regularly been produced

That’s changing, as the evidence of heating becomes undeniable, and the appeal of solar and wind energy increases

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/25/indiana-congressmen-mix-climate-change-conservative-values/5325122001/

But the act as written would certainly apply here.

On the main topic—right-wing DEI—this might be relevant:

…Against the onslaught of liberal multiculturalism and mass consumerism, de Benoist now argued that the Nouvelle Droite should struggle to uphold the ‘right to difference’. From here, it was a short distance to claiming a belated kinship with the plight of Third World nations. ‘Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness’, he wrote with Charles Champetier in their Manifesto for a European Renaissance (2012). The authors insisted that the Nouvelle Droite ‘upholds equally ethnic groups, languages, and regional cultures under the threat of extinction’ and ‘supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism’. Today, the preservation of anthropological difference and a sense of indigenous fragility are common tropes on the European far right. ‘We refuse to become the Indians of Europe’, proclaims the manifesto of the neo-fascist youth group Génération Identitaire…

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sea-and-earth

I am delighted to find that steven t johnson @61 and I are agreed on at least one point. He poses the question “Do I think bigotry is inherited and DNA commands that white people obsessively persecute Black people for fun and the satisfaction of their biological instincts?”, and for him the answer is NO.

For me also, as resoundingly as I can make it.

What I am not so delighted to find is that, despite his acknowledgment that these are not in fact my actual words, he claims that this is how “the question is supposed to be read by those in the know.” I think he means that this is how I supposed my words should be read, though I am not quite clear by whom, or what connection I am supposed to have to these hypothetical third-party readers. I cannot imagine by what train of thought – I can hardly say, of logic – he derived that opinion.

I would advise stj to have less faith in his powers of telepathy, and to try to restrict himself to rationally defensible arguments.

At the risk of discussing the original topic, I recall back in the 1980’s attending Feminist Studies tutorials as an undergrad where the point was made that we were undertaking the academic study of feminism, not primarily practicing faminism. So while our behaviour could be informed by feminism, the objection “that’s not feminist” was generally out of place. Which is perhaps exemplified by the first tutorial topic being “what does feminism mean to you” :)

But I was doing that recreationally while studying engineering, where diversity of thought is more the challenge of accepting that a photon is both a wave and a particle, at the same time, regardless of how you would prefer it to identify. Our “DEI” practice was a bunch of Indonesian students, many of whom were Muslim and some of the woman covered their hair. In a very white, very Christian conservative town in New Zealand that was more diversity than some people were comfortable with (Women? In Engineering! Inconceivable!)

I think the DEI bill referenced and similar ideas are very tempting for academics to treat as fun thought experiments, but it’s important to remember that they’re actually a very serious attempt by powerful people to attack something they hate. The latter context matters, because as mentioned above, the same people are also fans of slavery, especially forced pregnancy, execution and so on. This isn’t a trolley problem, it’s a very direct “politicians want the power to dictate what may be tuaght in universities, and who may teach it”.

LFC 73: this may seem tangential to the OP but it really isn’t. What I’m observing is the US liberal habit of whistling in the dark. The fascist goons are out to get you, they say so openly and consistently, and yet there are liberal academics around who still pretend that what is happening isn’t happening. Liberal University presidents lost their jobs as the result of a right wing smear campaign. Red states following Florida‘s lead are pulverizing Academic Freedom and weakening if not effectively abolishing tenure protections (https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/04/the-end-of-tenure-in-red-states). And some participants in this thread are responding with delusional arguments like
– They surely won’t do anything bad to academic freedom;
– They may have good intentions;
– The fascists don’t always get everything they want.

„Move on, nothing to see here.“ This is ridiculous.

I believe an earlier comment of mine got lost.

Here’s more relevant material concerning the right wign attacks on academic freedom, with respects to LFC.

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/open-season-on-scholars-of-race

LFC: “(1) why did the right wing target Gay? and (2) why was Gay forced to resign?”

A simple observation is that Gay wouldn’t have been forced to resign if the right wing hadn’t targeted her with a smear campaign. So the second question is meaningless without at least taking into account the answer to the first.

Even if the plagiarism accusations turned out to be the proximate cause of her fall, that is beside the point because nobody would have cared about it if there hadn’t been a right wing campaign targeting her for completely different reasons. So the ultimate cause was the right wing campaign. The conditions for that campaign to succeed (or even to gain traction, which in itself already constitutes success) include the following:

An organized, well-funded network of right wing culture war goons starting a politically motivated smear campaign
A right wing media circus amplifying said campaign
A weaponized Congressional committee controlled by Republicans
Donors putting pressure on the university boards
Board members caving to that pressure

If Gay had been a conservative or right wing University President who committed plagiarism, none of this would have been possible or even conveivable. If you still wish to dispute all of this and claim that “what got Gay fired were the cumulative plagiarism allegations” , then I think you fail to do what you claim to be doing, namely “addressing the specifics of this case”.