E-Pluribus | April 22, 2024
Rehabilitating DEI; make Earth Day great again; and how higher education should deal with identity.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jim Martin: College DEI programs can be saved, but they need to change
Many on the right are ready to simply put DEI out of its misery. But writing in the Charlotte Observer, Jim Martin, former Republican governor of North Carolina, says reforming it is still an option. Martin says if DEI actually becomes what it was billed as, it might be salvaged.
Recent years have seen a colossal failure for corporate and educational institutions where DEI was manipulated into a war against meritocracy and high standards. Corporate leaders soon saw this was counterproductive. Enthusiasts in academia reveled in it. Some saw an irresistible opportunity to exploit those who, for whatever reason, had missed key advantages of nurturing family, sound education and supportive communities of neighbors.
Instead of directing resources to help deserving individuals succeed in fields that had seemed closed to them, DEI got warped into a horrid excuse that they were victimized by others whose success was the unjustifiable result of “privilege,” twisting that word into a curse. Instead of healthy aspirations for these so-called “oppressed victims,” they were made to feel unfairly injured. Their difficulties were attributed to a system that unjustly rewarded rivals, now accused as “oppressors.”
Diversity’s contortion was reinforced with conformity at some schools, as candidates for faculty positions were required to show total allegiance to its divisiveness. Equality of opportunity was transfigured into equal outcomes, as grade inflation qualified too many students to graduate with honors. Inclusion became exclusion, with angry suspicion disrupting the vital unity of teams and the community of scholars.
DEI even provided a substitute religion with its trinitarian dogma, profession of faith and proselytizing fervor. Its priesthood badgered sinners to confess, recant and repent. Catechisms provided convenient guides for virtue signaling. Excommunication awaited dissenters at some schools where thoughts, words and gestures were monitored by young acolytes. How fitting, for the old Latin word for Roman “gods” was “dei.”
Widespread failure of DEI distortions needs a reform movement to revive its fundamental principles. Instead of inciting hatred and class warfare, let’s promote high standards and self-discipline. Instead of blaming lack of achievement on supposedly unfair privileges of others, let’s offer tutoring and encouragement. Instead of rejecting achievers as scorned oppressors, let’s insist that more study time improves subject mastery.
It will take fresh commitment to what DEI was originally proclaimed to mean. Or it can degenerate into defending the indefensible way noble ideals were transmuted into divisive insults.
Read it all.
Tom Basile: How liberals killed Earth Day
Similar to Jim Martin’s argument about DEI, Tom Basile of the Washington Times says the original ideas of Earth Day could actually be a positive celebration. But the left’s co-opting of it for ideological purposes may have tainted it beyond rehabilitation.
Earth Day used to be a celebration of our individual and collective responsibility to protect the planet and improve human health. It was about science and data. Unfortunately, today, Earth Day has little to do with the planet and more to do with far-left agendas meant to increase control over the population.
The paint-throwing, street-blocking activists will be out in force pushing their narrative of climate doom, more than happy to ignore science in the process. The media will reflexively add credibility to the nonsense.
[. . .]
As was laid bare at the height of the pandemic, far-left liberals in America are willing to be openly anti-science to drive their agenda of division and control. They routinely ignore or deny the substantial environmental progress that the United States has made in the last half a century, as well as the nation’s long-standing leadership role in environmental protection.
They ignore that even before the breathless push for electric vehicles and emissions caps, the U.S. was beating Europe in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. They ignore that while geologic history and environmental science make clear that the climate changes, there is little scientific data to support any effort by the U.S. government or Western governments collectively to affect the planet’s temperature.
They ignore that since the 1960s, predictions of overpopulation, running out of fossil fuels, palm trees growing in New York’s Central Park, a new ice age that would turn most of the country into Fargo in January, and dozens of other theories about climate doom have been inaccurate.
[. . .]
Most tellingly, climate activists routinely ignore the massive environmental destruction, including deforestation, which affects emissions and air quality, as well as human rights violations associated with mining for lithium and cobalt, two components necessary for electric vehicle battery production.
EVs put money in the pocket of the biggest global polluter and most prolific human rights violator, China. The leftists don’t care. They ignore that EV adoption will require massive increases in power generation, which will, in fact, increase emissions to accomplish.
Read the whole thing.
Yascha Mounk and Kwame Anthony Appiah: The Right—and Wrong—Way for Universities to Handle Identity
One could be forgiven for thinking the “i” in DEI at institutions of higher education stood for “identity” given the emphasis many universities place on the concept. At Persuasion, Yascha Mounk and New York Times columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah discuss the meaning and place of “identity” in a university setting and how it should - and shouldn’t - impact a school’s primary mission.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Kwame Anthony Appiah discuss why universities discarded an ethic of common humanity for a new form of identitarianism; how we can recognize and respect individual and cultural diversity without making it the main factor in our interactions; and why faculty must be agents for the change they wish to see in universities.
[. . .]
Yascha Mounk: You've been thinking for a very long time about questions of identity. I was at a dinner recently at which somebody pointed out that when they were doing diversity work around 2010, the name that came up most often in terms of intellectual foundations of what that work should look like was Anthony Appiah. Today, when people do diversity work, often the names that come up are rather different—Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi and others.
How do you see change in the way in which the public in general (and perhaps leading universities, in particular) have come to think about diversity in the last decades? I think people are going to be relatively familiar at this point with ideas like DiAngelo's in White Fragility, which says, for example, that white people are inescapably racist and that the first step is to acknowledge that they're going to be racist no matter what. How do the ideas that you've developed and advocate contrast with that?
Kwame Anthony Appiah: I think one way of explaining part of the change is a sort of generational thing, which is that I think there's a generation growing up now that might think that the ways we thought and acted about identity when my ideas were widely accepted didn't do the work, that American policemen are still shooting black people or putting their knees on their necks and so on. They wanted something more radical-seeming because they thought that the problem was deep and it needed a more radical solution.
I start from a general account of identities, not about race in particular. And in the general account, identities are these motivating labels that we use to think about our own lives and to think about how we should treat other people. And they're the subject of social negotiation. I don't own my labels; I share them with the other people who have the same label, but I also share them because they're part of public discourse with people who don't share the label. So the label black doesn't belong to black people, the label white doesn't belong to white people. The label man doesn't belong to men, the label woman doesn't belong to women. Trans people don't own trans identity. These identities belong to all of us, and we have to make them work together so that they work as well as possible for as many of us as possible.
I think I share with these more radical views the sense that a lot was wrong with the way these identities were configured in the past and that we've made progress. Maybe they don't think we've made enough progress, but I think we've made considerable progress, and maybe that's just because I'm older and I remember different times when I think it was sort of obvious that things were much worse than they are now around race and gender and gender identity. Anyone who's lived through the last 40 years has seen enormous and I think positive changes around those things. But the key thought though is that these are subjects of negotiation, which means we all have agency and we can make choices about how we live our identities. Our identities are not deterministic scripts that force us to do anything in particular—they affect, of course, how we interact with one another, but they don't determine how we interact with one another because we have choices to make.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
Here’s Seattle entrepreneur Steve Murch with a long-form tweet on liberalism versus progressivism.
Adam Rubenstein and Conor Friedersdorf compare Yale 2015 to Yale 2024:
And finally, Big Brother has come to England: