E-Pluribus | April 3, 2024
Utah versus DEI; Christianism versus Christianity; and equity versus equality.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Conor Friedersdorf: The State That’s Trying to Rein in DEI Without Becoming Florida
Florida’s Ron DeSantis can make lightning rods feel marginalized, and much of what is happening in his state is analyzed and re-analyzed by friends and foes alike, often in extreme terms. But other states are facing some of the same challenges in less hot spotlights. Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic looks at Utah’s recent attempts to reform DEI in that state without the same rancor Florida has experienced.
Roughly a decade after the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, began to spread in American higher education, a political backlash is here.
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The worst of these laws violate academic independence and free speech by attempting to forbid certain ideas in the classroom.
Utah’s Equal Opportunities Initiatives, or H.B. 261, which was signed into law in January, is more promising. It attempts to end the excessive and at times coercive focus on identity in higher education while also trying to protect academic freedom with carve-outs for research and course teaching.
The law prohibits universities from giving individuals preferential treatment or discriminating against them based on race, color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, or gender identity. It forbids offices that help students from excluding anyone based on their identity. It bans mandatory campus training sessions that promote differential treatment. It prohibits “discriminatory practices,” such as ascribing “values, morals, or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs to an individual” because of their identity.
Yet it makes real compromises with DEI supporters. Race-based cultural centers, like the Black Cultural Center at the University of Utah, will stay open. And Utah does not plan to fire all DEI staffers, as happened at the University of Florida––the law preserves the funding that DEI offices had while mandating that they refocus and rebrand as centers that attend to the needs of any student having trouble at college.
Even so, the law’s mandate to disregard race, gender, and other traits, rather than treating people differently based on their identity, is polarizing. Many of its critics believe that education policy must elevate identity to be “equitable”––that the just response to systemic racism, disparities in graduation rates, and the culture of a state that is almost 80 percent white and socially conservative, is targeted initiatives for Black, brown, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ students.
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Opponents of the bill think DEI’s emphasis on identity is worth keeping. Karen Kwan, a Democrat in the Utah Senate, holds a doctorate in education from the University of Utah. While citing various provisions in the law that she dislikes, she mentioned one that prohibits asserting in an administrative program or mandatory training that “meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist” or that “socio-political structures are inherently a series of power relationships and struggles among racial groups.”
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Disentangling DEI could prove useful as Utah’s public institutions chart a new course, she told me: “We’ve created a lot of issues for ourselves by bundling equity with diversity and inclusion.” Diversity and inclusion is about creating institutions where people of diverse backgrounds and experiences “can come together and be included.” A different question is how to respond “to the fact that not all people begin life at the same place on the playing field.” Although she believes both questions are important, and even related, clarity about how they are distinct from each other can lead to better discussions and policies.
Ultimately, Utah’s law is best understood as a worthy experiment. Efforts to rein in DEI bureaucracies on campus are overdue, given how often counterproductive methods are deployed in their name. And Utah’s law isn’t just reining in DEI’s excesses. It is trying out new ways to help students from diverse backgrounds thrive.
Of course, worthy experiments can fail, and people on all sides of the debate should pay attention to the effects the law has on the state’s college campuses. Will ending DEI affect undergraduate applications, enrollment, graduation rates, racial disparities, student satisfaction, and more? Utah will generate quantitative data on such questions. Studying the answers could tell us whether an identitarian approach like DEI is worth conserving or whether universalism can perform as well or better—exactly the kind of knowledge that universities ought to generate.
Read it all here.
Andrew Sullivan: The Intensification Of Christianism
Donald Trump’s latest foray into Bible marketing just before Easter has Andrew Sullivan revisiting the subject of Christianity and politics. Sullivan says both the left and now the right have taken Christianity places it never should have gone.
When I first wrote about “Christianism,” I saw it as a politicized version of Christianity, a form of theocratically-motivated illiberalism. It still is, of course, and now the guiding philosophy of, for example, the Heritage Foundation. And the fusion of religion and politics is a potent and volatile thing, as the Founders well understood. Hence my concern about George W Bush’s desire to place a prohibition on gay marriage as an amendment to the very Constitution of the United States.
But the current iteration — a new intensification — is more radical. It’s an explicit fusion of a particular strand of Christianity with the identity of the entire country and the transformation of a secular politician into an anointed instrument of God’s will. It makes voting an act of religious faithfulness, not democratic deliberation.
The absurdity of Trump of all people as an emblem of Christianity, a faith his entire life mocks, matters not. In fact, it’s a test of faith that you see how mysterious the ways of the Almighty are. The best we can hope for is my old friend Rod Dreher’s response to Trump’s gold-ribboned Bible — appropriately revolted, but politically undeterred: “As gross as this is, it must be remembered that Joe Biden stands for abortion on demand, and the right of children to be mutilated for the sake of becoming another sex. What Trump does above is tasteless, and maybe even sacrilegious. But what Biden stands for is, from an orthodox Christian point of view, evil.”
And there you have it. The constant refusal of mainstream and online conservatives to break from the ever-crazier fringes to their right is an exact mirror of the cowardly toleration of the woke fanatics on the center-left. But while the left now draws on the energies of the new religion of neoracism, the right still has the depth and range of Christianity to plunder, use and abuse its opponents with.
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Tragically, liberal Christianity has in far too many places become incapable of countering this with simple theological orthodoxy. It has itself become something of a social justice cult almost as politicized and partisan as the right. And yet this week of all weeks, and this Friday of all Fridays, we are invited to understand the deeper spiritual power that comes with the renunciation of earthly power. The longer I’ve lived, the more I have begun to grasp how this authentically Christian understanding of the limits of worldly power is a kind of bulwark for a free society, a guardrail against the foolish certainties of Christianist right and left, and a guarantee of some kind of spiritual humility and social peace.
Read the whole thing.
Joan Wong: The Triumph of ‘Equity’ Over ‘Equality’
Equality versus equity has gotten more complicated, Joan Wong writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Wong breaks down what the words have come to mean and how that affects the ability of various political and ideological groups to solve real-life problems.
Equity has become a familiar term on American college campuses in recent years, as well as a flashpoint in the nation’s culture wars. Centers for teaching and learning embrace it, as do institutes and education schools promoting “inclusive excellence” and “equity in higher education.” Meanwhile, diversity, equity, and inclusion offices have multiplied to such an extent that they have generated a reaction: Conservative politicians now seek to close them, and many on the right treat “equity” as a trigger word, progressive code for a litany of menacing ideas, including quotas and critical race theory, which emanate, they charge, from America’s “woke” colleges.
But what does “equity” really mean, and when and why did it emerge as a contemporary key word? The answers to those questions are bound up with the fate of a related concept, equality, and its troubled contemporary status in American life.
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[I]f it can be difficult to say precisely what equity is, many find it easier to say what equity is not. And here the most useful point of comparison is “equality.” The two words, to be sure, are closely related. Both derive from the Latin aequus, meaning “even,” “level,” or “equal,” a reference to the position of the pans on a balance scale. And as that common etymology suggests, both entail efforts to measure and compare relative weight. Yet today the words are most often used to signal divergence. A booklet from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), which defines itself as “dedicated to advancing the democratic purposes of higher education by promoting equity, innovation, and excellence,” makes the point nicely, noting that “equality is about sameness; it focuses on making sure everyone gets the same thing.” “Equity,” by contrast, “is about fairness; it ensures that each person gets what he or she needs.”
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[I]f in certain respects the language of equity is just a new iteration of the older logic of affirmative action and the social-democratic emphasis on the equality of ends, there is something else at play in the insistent critique of equality as homogenizing sameness and the corresponding demand that institutions recognize and respond to difference. As the website Race Forward explains, “Equality uses the same strategies for everyone, but because people are situated differently, they are not likely to get to the same outcomes. Equity uses differentiated and targeted strategies to address different needs and to get to fair outcomes.” The critique builds upon the legacy of the politics of identity, which has been bound up with the discourse of equity from the start, and it echoes a formulation first articulated by feminist critics in the 1980s and 1990s.
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[A]lthough equality and difference are always compatible to some degree — if for no other reason than that no two human beings are alike — equality claims, historically, have been most often attended by appeals to similarity, sameness, or common belonging. It is revealing that early dictionaries regularly defined equality as “conformity,” or glossed the word, like Noah Webster did in 1806, as “likeness, evenness, uniformity.”
In rejecting those definitions, and by presenting difference as the path to equality’s ultimate end, yesterday’s theorists bequeathed a powerful set of resources out of which to fashion today’s equity. Well-read as they tended to be in the writings of Marx and Engels, those theorists were likely also aware that the two regularly criticized equality as an “illusion” and false universal, which covered over genuine interests of power and obscured real needs. In any case, equality looks that way to many proponents of equity today, who oppose it to justice and fairness.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
Rutgers University recently hosted a talk entitled “Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle.” It appears to be everything you’d imagine it would be and more. Here are a few excerpts of a long thread of video clips.
Via Ryan Maue, truths inconvenient to climate activists apparently must be silenced:
And finally, Ben Kawaller spends some time talking to RFK, Jr. fans for The Free Press. Click for video.