Civil discourse on campus is put to the test

The same week that a University of California, Berkeley protest ended in violence, with doors broken, people allegedly injured, a guest lecture organized by Jewish students canceled and attendees evacuated by the police through an underground passageway, a group of academics gathered across the bay at Stanford to discuss restoring inclusive civil discourse on campus. The underlying question: In today’s heated political environment, is that even possible?

Over the course of two packed days of moderated and free discussion, we would try to test it out.

Paul Brest, a professor emeritus and former dean at Stanford Law School and one of the conference’s organizers, arrived at Stanford in 1969 in the throes of Vietnam War protests. The windows of the conservative Hoover Institution on campus had to be boarded up. In later years, violence broke out in protests over South Africa.

“Back then, it was students against the institution,” he said. “Now it’s very different because it’s student against student.”

Because I’d written about the difficulties students have had engaging in civil discourse, including a couple of columns on incidents at Stanford, I was one of two journalists invited to take part. Hosted by Stanford Law School and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, the conference brought together professors, deans and academic leaders who were largely liberal, with libertarians and a few conservatives and progressives in the mix. Unfortunately, one of the organizers said, most of the invited progressives — which is to say, the group that currently dominates campus debates — refused to come.

But those who did attend engaged in lively good-faith discussion about several hot-button topics ranging from free expression on campus to institutional neutrality. I’ll write about several of these in the future but will begin with one of the most divisive: diversity hiring statements, the requirement that all job applicants demonstrate their commitment to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion goals.

Brian Soucek, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law and an advocate of DEI statements, started the panel off by making his case. Mere statements of belief in DEI are not enough, he said. In an effort to reach consensus on what a DEI hiring statement should look like, in lieu of UC Davis’ current required statement, he proposed an abbreviated version that asked candidates specifically about DEI shortcomings and gaps in their fields of discipline and concrete steps they’ve taken or plan to take to address them.

The rest of the panel wasn’t having it.

Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College, endorsed the goal of diversifying staffs. The problem isn’t principle or legality, she said; it’s practice. Diversity according to whom? And in what context?

“It’s always ‘historically excluded and underrepresented,’” she said. “But historically when? Conservatives could argue they have been historically excluded. What’s underrepresented at Hillsdale College will be different from what’s underrepresented in the UC system.

“We all know that there’s a strong political orientation bias being perpetuated,” she continued. “‘Not a good fit,’ they’ll say. It’s fundamentally dishonest, and it creates more problems than it addresses.”

“People in the most elite systems know how to game the system,” Jeff Snyder, a professor of educational studies at Carleton, added. “It’s a privileged box-ticking exercise that ultimately degrades the purpose.” Together, he and Khalid filed an amicus brief for the plaintiffs against Florida’s Stop WOKE Act.

Imagine flipping the litmus test on its head, Snyder said. Suppose the requirement was a statement of patriotism at the University of Florida. Suppose they say, just as DEI advocates will say, that the definition of patriotism is expansive. And suppose he writes that his vision of patriotism is political protest in the model of Colin Kaepernick. He wouldn’t get the job. Nor would he get a job if he wrote a DEI statement for Carleton saying he mentored members of the campus NRA group or the Young Republicans Club, both of which are underrepresented minorities on campus. DEI statements are inherently ideological. A chilling effect is inevitable.

“What they want are nonstraights, nonwhites and nonmen,” said Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University. “But they don’t say it that way. There’s a lack of forthrightness that breaks people in these situations.” In his field, men are underrepresented and queer scholarship is overrepresented. “But it strains credulity to say that anyone would read a DEI statement about someone’s queer work and say that’s an overrepresented group.”

Soucek gamely continued his defense against what he called “anecdata.” He described an approach Berkeley tried out in 2018, in which it considered candidates’ DEI statements before looking at the rest of their applications. Anyone whose DEI statement didn’t pass the first round was eliminated from the next pool.

“People criticized Berkeley afterward that Berkeley didn’t even consider the applicants’ credentials,” Soucek said. “But I would say that DEI statements are credentials.” And let’s be honest, he said. If you look at the cover letter first, you’re privileging another set of credentials first: people’s names, which can tell you a lot — their institutions, their mentors and connections. This was just another and no less valid approach to narrowing the pool.

Why not anonymize all applications? Khalid responded. In fields like history, political science and computer science, 11 universities dominate 50% of all tenure positions. Whatever they’re doing now, diversity efforts clearly aren’t working. She compared DEI statements with DEI diversity training. “The whole ‘Look into your hearts and say how racist you are’ — that does nothing,” Khalid said. “Painful, excruciating and pathetic is the only way to describe them.”

Simply requiring DEI statements gives a pass to universities for not fixing existing problems, added Carol Sumner, the chief diversity officer of Northern Illinois University. She then raised a question: “Is the statement the problem, or is it the subjectivity of the person reading the statement you don’t trust?”

Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, expressed concern that poorly designed DEI encourages essentialist thinking — the idea that all women or members of the group have similar views or experiences. In his view, DEI programs can be “a way to offload responsibility from the rest of the university and take pressure off them for what actually could be substantive policies that are harder and more expensive.”

One thing on which everyone agreed: Schools are failing at real diversity. DEI statements aren’t necessarily helping. Instead of potentially creating new problems, academia needs to fix existing ones.

“We all had the shared view that diversity and inclusion are good but that there are legitimate concerns about how we promote these things,” Soucek said when I spoke to him afterward. Addressing those knotty issues in open dialogue is a good place to start.