Conservatives must keep up pressure on higher education to block DEI | Opinion

Under pressure from Republican politicians and conservative donors, Harvard, MIT and other elite institutions are reluctantly beginning to back away from progressive illiberalism.

Consider Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas)’s new DEI Dismantlement Bill, which would eliminate mandatory federal diversity statements and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) managers and initiatives. Importantly, the bill would hit research funding for the most egregious DEI offenders, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, dramatically changing the incentive structure for academic research in the United States.

While some conservatives cling to the optimistic assumption that a quiet majority of college faculty are suddenly gaining the confidence to oppose woke policies and challenge radical activists, this is not borne out by the evidence. Senators like Vance and Cloud have a key role to play in the ongoing fight to restore political neutrality and freedom of expression to our nation’s institutions, schools, and broader public culture.

Harvard University’s School of Letters recently announced it would end the requirement of diversity statements in hiring, which require applicants for jobs, promotions, and grants to demonstrate how they will advance DEI principles as a condition for success.

This requirement discriminates against conservative and classical liberal applicants who reflect the views of the majority of Americans and who prioritize equal treatment, objective truth, and free speech over equal outcomes and the emotional safety of minorities. The diversity statement is a pledge of loyalty that infringes on applicants’ freedom of conscience and discriminates on the basis of philosophical beliefs.

Harvard’s retraction of its diversity statement follows a similar move by MIT, making it the first elite blue-state university to do so. Harvard has also vowed to remain neutral on political issues that don’t relate to the university’s narrow self-interest.

Why the shift?

The optimistic view is that most faculty, previously intimidated by the loud voices of a few DEI activists and unable to hold their heads high, are now feeling emboldened to bring reason, debate, and power back into the classroom. The argument goes that universities will reform themselves unless conservative politicians step in, because doing so would politicize DEI, turn it into a front line in the culture war, and unite academics to thwart internal reform.

This explanation is not factual. As I argue in my book, extensive research data shows that The Third AwakeningThe rise of cancel culture and DEI comes primarily from “compassionate” left-liberals, not the revolutionary far-left.

Driven by guilt, empathy, and alarmist fear of the majority, left-liberals created taboos around race, gender, and sexual orientation, expanded definitions of harassment and discrimination, and led the expansion of DEI infrastructure like affirmative action, speech codes, and diversity training.

The far Left has co-opted the liberal apparatus of taboos, norms, and policies as a power multiplier, but they did not create it. Radical innovations like critical race theory and gender theory now provide the vocabulary for diversity training and teaching materials, but phrases like “defund the police” only gained traction because they resonated with the underlying “majority is bad, minority is good” reflex of the liberal majority in many elite institutions.

Despite the anecdotal evidence, mandatory diversity statements are popular among academics: Surveys in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia found that in all four countries, social science faculty at elite institutions support these statements by a nearly two-to-one ratio.

American academics are 50 percentage points more likely to support “decolonizing” the curriculum by requiring race and gender quotas for authors on reading lists than to oppose them. Most academics favor applying social pressure to colleagues who refuse to attend diversity training. The public who identify as progressive are less supportive of academic freedom than progressive academics.

This DEI majority sentiment is echoed in a recent survey of Harvard faculty, where most faculty see donors and the political right, not DEI or the left, as the primary threat to their freedom. This thinking was also reflected in Columbia University’s 65-29 vote by literature professors to censure Dean Nemat Shafik for calling police to clear a pro-Palestinian encampment after protesters vandalized Hamilton Hall.

Compare this vote to 1969, when Cornell faculty voted by a 2-to-1 margin to censure President James Perkins for catering to the demands of radical left-wing protesters. An important difference is that the ratio of left to right among social science and humanities researchers has skyrocketed from roughly 3-to-1 in the 1960s to 13-to-1 today. In the 1960s, researchers largely distanced themselves from protesters and called for rules to be enforced. Today, many researchers encourage activism, abandoning the rules to join the protests.

Diversity statements were first banned in Republican-leaning states like Florida and Texas, or by state-appointed trustees like in North Carolina. Soon after, Harvard President Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth McGill, and MIT President Sally Kornbluth were publicly shamed at congressional hearings on anti-Semitism following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

It’s no coincidence that Kornbluth was the first leader of an elite school to ban diversity statements, a move Harvard has now followed suit. The hearings led to the firings of Gay and McGill, served as a warning to Kornbluth and others, donors including Bill Ackman and Ken Griffin aired their displeasure online and hit the university’s balance sheet.

We should not fool ourselves. Most academics and administrators support DEI, but external pressure from conservative politicians and donors has forced leaders of prominent universities to change course. Where external pressure is weak, such as in Canada and California, progressive illiberalism prevails. Only sustained political intervention can reform universities and public institutions.

If voters want to rid their schools, government offices, and other environments of woke politics, they must use their elected government to make a difference.

Eric Kaufman is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.