E-Pluribus | May 14, 2024
How diversity conquered the world; a conservative embrace of the left's tactics; and reformers first, doctors second.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Nicolas Langlitz: How ‘Diversity’ Became the Master Concept of Our Age
It’s difficult to think of a more ubiquitous word in recent years: “diversity.” In a long piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nicolas Langlitz looks at the origins of viewpoint diversity in particular and how the concept has infiltrated so many aspects of modern institutional life.
Diversity has come to pervade every aspect of American science and scholarship. Colleges are prioritizing hires that increase the diversity of their faculty. Applicants are asked to submit diversity statements. Diversity managers invite diversity consultants to offer diversity trainings in hope of reducing bias among an increasingly diverse faculty and student body. Prominent natural scientists refuse to speak on “manels,” that is, conference panels exclusively composed of men. Journal editors check submitted manuscripts to make sure they do not only cite white male authors; and critics demand that these gatekeepers themselves become racially more diverse to ensure a distribution of knowledge that does justice to human diversity.
The bulk of diversity practices pursue the moral-political goal of social justice by making students, faculty, administrators, and researchers more representative of the general population. However, in the context of research and higher education, diversity practices are simultaneously framed as serving epistemic goals: Knowledge produced by diverse scholars and scientists is considered superior to knowledge produced in a homogeneous group. There is now a true diversity of diversity. Diversity oriented toward social justice has been opposed to another type of diversity: viewpoint diversity. The controversy over viewpoint diversity is particularly suitable to study the specifically epistemic stakes in the valorization of diversity, because the proponents of viewpoint diversity see as their primary goal the advancement of science, not social justice.
Where did viewpoint diversity come from? In the 2010s, American social psychologists began to argue over how to deal with the fact that most of them were liberals (in the American sense) and looked at human social behavior and cognition through that ideological lens. The quarrel had been triggered by Jonathan Haidt’s argument that, for epistemological reasons, their field needed more political diversity. Only a system of ideological checks and balances would enable them to rein in the otherwise-unquestioned prejudices of the majority.
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That the proponents of viewpoint diversity focus on science does not mean that their project is free of moral-political views. In fact, their political epistemology is very much rooted in the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill and emerged in response to the American culture wars. Part of their political mission is to emphasize scientific knowledge production rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. Beginning in 2015, the nonprofit advocacy group Heterodox Academy carried the demand for more viewpoint diversity into the wider moral economy of higher education.
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Viewpoint diversity only entered the conversation about liberal bias in 2001, when the forensic psychologist Richard Redding made the case for sociopolitical diversity in psychology. Concerned that the American Psychological Association had expanded its advocacy efforts during the 1990s and that U.S. senators and federal judges had begun to express distrust in social scientific expertise, which they perceived as corrupted by a doctrinaire commitment to liberal values, Redding also called on his colleagues to provide analyses that are “as objective and value-neutral as humanly possible.” But, recognizing that humans could never analyze human life in a perfectly value-neutral manner, he also urged psychologists to “disclose their biases” and “foster a true sociopolitical dialogue in our research, practice, and teaching that would give equal time to opposing views.”
[. . .]
The liberal-bias controversy represents an important chapter in the history of the so-called “post truth” era. In the 2010s, this crisis of trust in scientific knowledge gave fresh salience to the concerns that Haidt, a skillful popularizer with a wide-ranging social network, brought back on the agenda: If social psychologists wanted to produce valid truth claims about the minds of morally and politically diverse people, they would have to become more morally and politically diverse themselves.
Haidt’s provocation led to an extended, still-ongoing debate among social psychologists. The commentaries on Haidt’s plea for political diversity can be roughly sorted into two equal camps. One side considered viewpoint diversity an appropriate remedy for social psychology’s liberal bias; the other would prefer minimizing rather than pluralizing political bias in science. Many of the responses in favor of viewpoint diversity were still critical of particular aspects of the Haidtean argument. Some argued that construing viewpoint diversity exclusively in political terms was too narrow because any lack of diversity could result in systematic error. Hence, the field would also profit from religious and methodological diversity and from the inclusion of citizen scientists not confined to an academic perspective. Others agreed that increasing viewpoint diversity was desirable but cautioned that it had to be accompanied by the cultivation of tolerance because otherwise people wouldn’t feel safe to also express and take seriously divergent viewpoints.
Read it all.
Kathleen Stock: Safetyism doesn’t belong on campus
The left has taken it on the chin in recent months regarding student protests in America, but British writer and philosopher Kathleen Stock at UnHerd warns that the right isn’t completely innocent either. After years of mocking “safe spaces” and urging that college students be treated as adults, Stock says the recent responses by conservatives are a little too familiar.
I have just spent a week in the US: one in which the main news stories were not about Gaza, but rather about university encampments and occupations protesting what is happening in Gaza. Everyone seemed fascinated by this strange shadow play, whose protagonists were self-indulgent Ivy League students and their hawkish critics rather than Hamas members or IDF soldiers. Whatever political and psychological dynamics were animating the furious homegrown conflict, it seemed to have little to do with what was happening thousands of miles to the East.
The fog of war was real, though involved no confusion about body counts or potential crimes against humanity. Instead, the burning questions were about whether a Jewish student at Yale really had been “stabbed in the eye” by pro-Palestinian protestors as was initially reported, or whether she had accidentally got in the way of some exuberant flag-waving; whether a UCLA student had been “beaten unconscious”, or instead fallen over in a chaotic kerfuffle and gone deliberately limp. Never mind for the moment what atrocities were or were not being committed in Gaza: more to the point, did pro-Israel supporters at UCLA knowingly risk the life of someone with a severe banana allergy, by throwing several pieces of the fruit into the “liberated zone” there?
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It is often remarked that the modern liberal quest to free both self and society from traditional cultural norms and boundaries tends to coincide with increased acceptance of state surveillance and authoritarian social control. Even so, it is rare to see institutions openly inciting both liberation and repression at the very same time. Small wonder that susceptible young people are confused. “I thought that this university accepted me because I am an advocate, because I am someone who will fight for what they believe in, no matter what,” mournfully recounted one Vanderbilt alumnus, originally lauded by faculty and administrators for making a stand against perceived oppression, but now expelled for the very same thing. You can laugh with enjoyable schadenfreude at the naivety; but you should probably also be horrified at the unprincipled ease with which Frankenstein has set the dogs upon the pious, guilt-ridden young monster he had a hand in creating.
Equally depressing has been the way that many conservative commentators, normally professional scourges of wokeness, have become apparent fans of safetyism for Jewish students (please note — not safety, but safetyism). Just as the modern Left either tends to cheer or stay silent as Right-coded views are eliminated from the academy either by stealth or by force, many on the supposedly freedom-loving modern Right apparently have little to say about the violation of the basic right to peaceful speech and assembly, when it comes to defending the perceived interests of Palestinians. (Though some of the university protests sought illegitimately to impose a heckler’s veto upon the free speech or movement of others, many did not.)
There has also been relatively little pushback against the sort of hyperbole purporting to justify aggressive managerial and police interventions on campuses; even where its format and tone vividly reminds one of the activist guilt-tripping of which the modern Left is so fond, and the Right normally so critical. Many cultish identitarian tics familiar from social justice activism turn up in pro-Israel discourse about the protests, and yet remain uncriticised from the Right.
Read it all here.
Ronald A. Lindsay: From Caregivers to Social Reformers
What do people look for most in health care professionals? Competent medical care would seem the obvious answer, but some in the medical profession are trying to shift the emphasis to - you guessed it - DEI. At Quillette, Ronald Lindsay reports on this “quiet revolution.”
A quiet revolution in the practice of medicine in North America has taken place within the last decade. Professional associations, medical schools, and an increasing number of physicians no longer consider the primary duty of the physician to be care of the individual patient, but rather social reform—in particular, the urgent goal of achieving equity by addressing the social needs of identity groups perceived as marginalised. Evidence of this transformation of the physician’s role may be found in the express commitments and strategic plans of medical associations, admission requirements, curricula, and programes of medical schools, and the initiatives, statements, and actions of numerous physicians.
Individual behaviour and an individual’s genetic inheritance are significant causes of diseases and disorders. For example, several of the leading risk factors for cancer—obesity, alcohol use, and smoking—are behaviour-related. Hypertension is linked to both genetics and behaviour. Alzheimer’s has a definite connection to genetics, as do autoimmune diseases. Many more examples can be given. The list of maladies connected to either individual behaviour or genetics or both is long, encompassing most infirmities other than infectious diseases, and even with this last category, genetics can play a role in susceptibility to infection. Yet, the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest professional association of physicians in the United States, in its strategic plan for racial justice and health equity, exhorts physicians to turn their attention away from genetics and individual behaviour and instead move upstream to address the “root causes” of social inequities, which (the AMA hypothesises) are the underlying causes of poor health. And what are these root causes? The AMA’s list reads like a first-year college student’s rote recitation of DEI jargon: “white supremacy, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and xenophobia.”
One might think that this list of perceived social ills is just rhetoric paying obeisance to fashionable social-justice ideology. But this unfairly discounts the AMA’s commitment to the remaking of physician’s obligations. The AMA expressly states that physicians must purge themselves of “malignant narratives” such as “a narrow focus on individuals” and adds:
This shifting of the health outcomes narrative from the cause; solely from the individual and behavioral level to the causes of causes, the social and specifically the socioeconomic factors that influence the health narrative at the social and structural levels, is a central priority in health equity work. As anti-racist historian Ibram X. Kendi has argued, “one either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist.”
This represents a sea change in the responsibilities of physicians, from a focus on the conditions and needs of individual patients to being agents of radical social reform.
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One remarkable aspect of this transformation of the role of the physician is that, until now, modern medicine has been grounded in sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physiology. We expect our physicians to have expertise in such areas. This is why we believe we can trust them when, for example, we are given a prescription of amlodipine to treat our hypertension. Physicians, as a rule, have no special training in history, economics, moral philosophy, or any other discipline that would allow them to become experts on the reforms needed to improve our society.
Nevertheless, medical schools have now embarked on an effort to provide a patina of authority to physicians’ pronouncements on social ills by incorporating instruction on social-justice ideology into their curricula. For example, a fifth of the first-year curriculum at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine is now devoted to the study of “Structural Racism and Health Equity.” Georgetown University does not even wait for classes to begin. Incoming students must take antiracism training during the summer so that “they will have a health equity and anti-racist lens to apply to their next four years of coursework.” Meanwhile, the Jacobs School of Medicine at the University at Buffalo has implemented antiracism as the core principle of its entire curriculum. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has gone further, committing itself to a wholesale “anti-racist transformation in medical education”—a transformation it is also helping to implement at “11 partner medical schools in the United States and Canada.” These efforts are in keeping with the AMA’s goal of “expanding medical school and physician education to include equity, antiracism, structural competency, public health and social sciences, [and] critical race theory.”
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali posted an excerpt of her latest essay on how accusations of “Islamophobia” and the legal system have been weaponized:
Here’s a flashback from Steve McGuire on why today’s Harvard students assumed their protests would be well received by the school:
And finally, the New York Post headline writers take on Duke student protesters. The Post wins.