July 27, 2023
By Christopher F. Rufo
Mr. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a trustee of New College of Florida and the author of “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.”
Academia is in the midst of a generational turmoil. Blue states such as California and Oregon have recently transformed their public universities with expansive “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs that have profound implications for admissions, speech, hiring and scholarship. Red states such as Florida and Texas have recently passed legislation abolishing them, concluding that the programs that have sprung up to execute D.E.I. promote a stifling orthodoxy that undermines the pursuit of truth.
This appears to be a binary left-right conflict. The right sees the abolition of D.E.I. as a step toward meritocracy, while the left sees it as an attack on minority rights. But moving beyond reflexive partisanship, there is a strong argument for abolishing D.E.I. programs on liberal grounds.
I am a noted conservative opponent of critical race theory and D.E.I. programs and was recently appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as a trustee of New College. I believe that properly understood, the classical liberal arts tradition is the best hope for the American university system. We are faced with a paradox: In order to strengthen the values of liberal education, political leaders must use democratic power to reform drifting academic institutions and resist the process of ideological capture.
The most significant question looming over this debate is one that, unfortunately, has rarely been posed by either critics or supporters of D.E.I. programs: What is the purpose of a university? For most of the classical liberal tradition, the purpose of the university was to produce scholarship in pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful. The university was conceived as a home for a community of scholars who pursued a variety of disciplines, but were united in a shared commitment to inquiry, research and debate, all directed toward the pursuit of the highest good, rather than the immediate interests of partisan politics.
Today, many universities have consciously or unconsciously abandoned that mission and replaced it with the pursuit of diversity, equity and inclusion. Many D.E.I. programs seem to be predicated on a view radically different from the liberal tradition: namely, that the university is not merely a home for the discovery of knowledge, but also a vehicle for activism, liberation and social change.
The criticism of such programs might begin with a simple question: Even on its own terms, does D.E.I. actually work? And the answer, according to the best available evidence, appears to be no. Researchers at Harvard and Tel Aviv University studied 30 years of diversity training data from more than 800 U.S. companies and concluded that mandatory diversity training programs had practically no effect on employee attitudes — and sometimes activated bias and feelings of racial hostility. There is no reason to believe that similar programs on university campuses have better outcomes.
In fact, there is much greater cause for concern with D.E.I. in academia. While many corporations understandably discourage internal debate about political issues unrelated to their business interests, universities are supposed to provide a forum for a wide range of views and perspectives, in the interest of reasoning toward truth. D.E.I. programs as currently carried out are antithetical to this pursuit. In practice, they often restrict the range of discourse, push a narrow political ideology on the campus community and micromanage the language that professors, administrators and students should use.
For City Journal, the magazine of the Manhattan Institute, I recently conducted investigative reporting for a series on the ideological nature of the way D.E.I. was practiced in Florida’s public universities. My intention was to go beyond the euphemisms and expose the specific content of these programs, which, I believed, would shock the conscience of voters across the political spectrum. These programs have become commonplace not only in official “diversity and inclusion” programs, but also throughout administrative and academic departments. The University of Florida, for example, managed more than 1,000 separate D.E.I. initiatives, which included, as part of a professional development conference, a presentation featuring material that declared the United States was rooted in “white supremacy” and included mantras from Racists Anonymous.
The University of Central Florida, in its “Inclusive Faculty Hiring” guide, described merit in faculty hiring as a “narrative myth” and advised employees to avoid using it in job descriptions and hiring materials. The guide also advocated explicit quotas of “minoritized” groups in its hiring practices. Florida International University’s Office of Social Justice and Inclusion effectively served as a recruiting ground for political activism, encouraging students to participate in grass roots campaigns — mostly modeled on left-wing movements. In one training session, Black Lives Matter was held up as an exemplary movement and students were prepared for the possibility of violent confrontation with the police.
These are not neutral programs to increase demographic diversity; they are political programs that use taxpayer resources to advance a specific partisan orthodoxy. After the publication of my reporting, Mr. DeSantis signed legislation abolishing D.E.I. programs in Florida’s public universities, arguing that they violated the principles of liberal education.
Despite the anti-liberal nature of these programs, however, many center-left liberals have expressed concern about abolishing D.E.I. in state universities. Some commentators have claimed that Mr. DeSantis’s legislation amounts to a restriction on freedom of speech; others have asserted that it violates the autonomy of public universities.
Neither argument, however, passes muster. D.E.I. administrators in state universities are not faculty members and, as public employees, are not entitled to unlimited First Amendment rights in their official duties, according to Supreme Court precedent. Universities require competent administrators, but their role is to support the scholarly mission of the university, not use it as a vehicle for their favored political interests. Campuses are better served when administrators delegate the function of social criticism to faculty and students, rather than promote a single answer to complex political problems.
We must keep in mind that public universities are public institutions, governed by state legislatures and funded by taxpayers. Their institutional autonomy is a privilege granted by voters, not a right guaranteed by the Constitution. As such, legislators are well within their right to enact reforms and reorient their state universities toward the pursuit of scholarship, rather than activism, which I believe cannibalizes the academic mission. When universities have deviated from the wishes of the public, political intervention is not only lawful, but also necessary to ensure democratic governance.
Voters can choose to shape and direct their public universities in either direction. But my contention is that these two approaches are in conflict, and in practice, only one or the other will prevail. Universities that have put highly ideological D.E.I. programs at the center of academic life are eroding the environment of open, substantive debate that is the basic prerequisite for classical liberal learning. They will end up promoting diversity in name only, as activism replaces scholarship and the rationale for the university slowly disappears.
Abandoning D.E.I. does not mean making universities intolerant or inhospitable. In fact, there are better ways to ensure fair treatment for all and protect the integrity of academia. After abolishing D.E.I., legislators can adopt a policy of colorblind equality to help establish the equal treatment of individuals, regardless of race, sex or other characteristics, and affirm the principles of the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, which holds that the university administration must remain neutral on political controversies and delegate the function of dissent to scholars and students.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases, there is more need than ever for clear policies. The application of the Kalven principles, in particular, will help depolarize academic institutions and relieve university administrators of the constant pressure to respond to every political controversy. Taken together, these policies will ultimately help public universities restore their reputation as stewards of scholarship, rather than political partisans.
These two proposals would honor the principles of liberal education, encourage a culture of open debate and cultivate a “community of scholars” with a wide diversity of opinions and a shared commitment to truth — something that both liberals and conservatives can and should support.