As the fall semester begins at colleges and universities across the country, students, faculty, alumni and donors are watching closely, anticipating that new and returning administrators alike may bring with them new policies on free speech, protests and the role that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) will play on campus in areas other than admissions.
An August 30 op-ed in The New York Times tackled that last issue and suggested current DEI programs are not working and are “subverting their schools’ educational missions.” The guest essay was co-authored by Paul Brest, professor emeritus and former dean at Stanford Law School and president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation from 2000-2012, and Emily J. Levine, associate professor of education and history at Stanford. On the day it was published it attracted over 1,000 comments – enough to shut down the comments section.
The authors say they are not calling for the complete abandonment of diversity programs as “some of these programs most likely serve the important goal of ensuring that all students are valued and engaged participants in their academic communities.” What they find concerning are the programs and DEI trainings which “undermine the very groups they seek to aid by instilling a victim mindset and by pitting students against one another.”
Recognizing “how exclusionary and counterproductive some of these programs can be,” they call attention to the antisemitism and anti-Israel bias of protests at Stanford University following the Hamas attacks on Israel. That bias, they note, is baked into current DEI ideology as manifested in “a DEI training program at Stanford a few years ago [where] 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.”
In place of current DEI models, Brest and Levine call for programs employing a pluralistic approach, recognizing a universal need for belonging and fostering “empathy with others rather than a competition among sufferings.” Such programs would involve “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.”
“Success,” they say, “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.”
Brest and Levine acknowledge their recommendations will face strong headwinds from those who advocate for the complete abandonment of DEI and those who are adamant it be retained in its current form. Yet they persist in advocating change, concluding, “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.”
