Stacy Hawkins, I Said So

Stacy Hawkins, a former vice dean and law professor at Rutgers Law School, recently wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article’s subtitle reads, “If critics have a problem with the goal of diversity, they should say so”—I’ll come to the main title later. As one of these critics, I’ve been vocal about my stance since 2003, when I published Diversity: The Invention of a Concept—and even prior to that. My book doesn’t make me special; my bookshelf is full of works from other academics that critique the concept of diversity, some written before mine and many since. I re-upped my enlistment in the anti-diversity brigade in 2019 in another, albeit shorter book, Diversity Rules. So, Professor Hawkins, or maybe her editor at Chronicle, annoyed me with her jab calling out critics of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) as though we are too faint-hearted to criticize “the goal of diversity” per se.

But I must acknowledge that she has a point.

For example, a Substack writer, Julian Adorney, who says he works to preserve and repair “our liberal social contract,” recently published a piece titled “Can DEI Be Salvaged?” Mr. Adorney criticizes the ideology known as DEI but has soft spots for the D and I. It is the E that gives him trouble.

He writes that “’Diversity’ and ‘Inclusion’ are noble goals,” and he declares, “‘Diversity’ as a concept is hugely important and can absolutely be salvaged.”

I’ve not run across Mr. Adorney’s writings before, but I recognize his type. He wants to be sure he is not mistaken for one of those ignorant or unenlightened people who are not on board with modern values. He affirms, “We absolutely should see people of all ethnicities, genders, and classes at almost every level of society.” Achieving this requires effort. “Some people still face discrimination based on things like their background or their immutable characteristics,” he explains:

For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science published a study noting that black Americans are ‘10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding.’

But, the “equity” part of DEI gives him pause because the equitists insist that all social goods be apportioned strictly by identity group and strictly by the percentage of the population wearing each identity group jacket. But, cautions Mr. Adorney, some “inequalities come from cultural differences,” which are good and healthy. Mr. Adorney holds that “equality of opportunity” would be a far better goal than equity.

Professor Hawkins doesn’t call out Mr. Adorney. Rather, her immediate target is Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, who recently made himself obnoxious to diversicrats by declaring himself opposed to that device beloved by DEI administrators, the mandatory “diversity statement.”

If diversity is such a good thing, why shouldn’t we expect every student, every faculty candidate, and every staff member at a university to avow their love of it?

Professor Hawkins pokes Professor Kennedy for hypocrisy: he denounces “diversity statements” but  acknowledges that they are used to advance “worthy goals.”

I am not a fan of Professor Hawkins’s ideas about educational policy, but she has indeed caught Professor Kennedy in an awkwardness—an awkwardness that ensnares many others, such as Mr. Adorney. Treating “diversity” as a spotless form of excellence but then withdrawing from the way in which colleges and universities attempt to achieve it raises some questions.

The main title of Professor Hawkins’ Chronicle article is “DEI Statements Are Not About Ideology. They’re About Accountability.” Most of her article deals with the “new urgency” of meeting the “needs” of all those different identity groups on campus. She defends “diversity statements” as just a practical tool in this indispensable effort to overcome “harassment and discrimination.”

Her argument, however, turns circular.

Higher education needs these supposedly practical tools to advance DEI because colleges and universities “profess a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” If that is the goal of higher education, then the practical matter is just getting the job done. “It is impossible to foster vibrant learning communities if some members of that community are made to feel like outsiders, their worth questioned and their dignity assailed.”

Professor Hawkins then meets me directly—or I should say, she meets all of us who oppose the whole diversity industry or, ahem, the concept.  “Their complaint is not with faculty diversity statements or any of the other efforts that constitute the so-called ‘DEI bureaucracy,’” she writes. “Their complaint seems to be with the missions and values of colleges.” Yes. But there she stops. Professor Hawkins doesn’t tell us what those complaints are. Perhaps in her view, those complaints are so manifestly absurd that it is enough to point vaguely in their direction as if to say, “And over beyond those hills live people who are godless heathens.”

But let me give, in brief compass, what we opposers actually believe.

We hold that higher education is primarily about education, not indoctrination.  We hold that colleges and universities should be open without fear or favor to anyone who seeks knowledge and is committed to the pursuit of truth by disciplined study, rational argument, dialog, and careful sifting of the evidence.  We hold that the ethnic group, religion, sex, sexual preference, and other identity characteristics of an individual are generally irrelevant to the academic enterprise.  The modifier “generally” is needed because exceptional circumstances arise in which an “identity” runs athwart the purpose of a particular college.  Perhaps a single-sex college wants to remain that way.  It would be unusual for a professed Baptist to seek admission to a Jewish Theological Seminary.

Turning higher education into a means of elevating minority groups by privileging some of their members, revising the curriculum to match what administrators think are the real interests of these minority groups, altering standards, reordering student life, and saturating the whole college experience with an ideology that counterpoises victims and oppressors—by all these and a hundred other steps—we arrive at the DEI-versity.  And we abandon the substance of higher education for a superficial political project.  The university becomes an institution that dilutes instruction and displaces its true historical mission in favor of being an agent in a grand campaign for social justice.

That campaign, in turn, undermines our freedoms, not least intellectual freedom. “Diversity” as a concept is of recent historical vintage. It emerged into prominence in 1978 in Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion in the Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California vs Bakke. It gained traction in the 1980s as colleges and universities adopted the term as a substitute for affirmative action on the calculation that it had a better chance of surviving legal challenges.  Much more could be said about this history—Read my book! But it could be left at this: “diversity” is not an age-old American ideal.  It is not in our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, or anywhere in the legal history of the country or its popular ideals.  It was invented as part of a political agenda and nurtured by activists who mostly disdained America and its culture.

Several generations have now been taught that “diversity” is our highest ideal. It has become so ingrained that many now find it hard to imagine we could live without it.  But we can.  It is a false ideal that imposes the priority of identity groups over free individuals.  It gives us the petty—and increasingly not so petty—tyranny of activist bureaucrats who arrogate to themselves the powers to say who we are, what we should want, what we can say, and how we should judge one another.  “Diversity” now rules us, not in the sense of making us more loving, tolerant, or respectful of differences.  It rules us by making us subject to a pernicious ideology.

“If critics have a problem with the goal of diversity, they should say so,” says Professor Hawkins.  I just did so—again.

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