Opinion | Universities are failing in terms of inclusion

Education

For the past five weeks, Jewish students on American campuses have been confronted by those celebrating a terrorist operation that involved the mass murder and alleged rape of fellow Jews. They see images of people tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children. At MIT, Jewish students report that some faculty members told them to avoid the university’s main lobby — where a pro-Palestinian protest was taking place — for their own safety. At Cooper Union, Jewish students were barricaded in the library in a protest that started as a pro-Palestinian demonstration and quickly turned into, one student reported, “purely anti-Jew.”

Rabbi Nomi Manon, who has led the Hillel at the University at Albany since 2011, told The Albany Times-Union: “Every Jewish student I talk to feels a sense of impending doom, fear, anxiety or anger about the truly striking rise in anti-Semitism.” Shabbat Kestenbaum, a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, told The Forward: “These past few weeks have been the most isolating, sad and maddening experience I have ever had.”

Universities are supposed to be centers of inquiry and curiosity – places where people tolerate differences and learn about other points of view. Instead, too many of them have degenerated into brutal ideological war zones, so today the most hostile place to be an American Jew is not some formerly restricted country club, but on a college campus.

How on earth did this happen? I have been teaching on and off on college campuses for 25 years. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that American adolescence and young adulthood—particularly for those who end up in elite schools—now take place within a specific kind of ideological sphere.

It focuses on a sharp ideological framework that has spread in high schools and colleges, on social media, in diversity training seminars, and in popular culture. The framework does not yet have a good name. It draws on the thinking of intellectuals ranging from French philosopher Michel Foucault to critical race theorist Derrick Bell. (For a good intellectual history, I recommend Yascha Mounk’s recent book, “The Identity Trap.”)

The general ideas associated with this ideology are now quite well known:

We should not emphasize what unites all people; we must highlight what divides us.
Human relations are power struggles between oppressors and oppressed groups.
Human communication is limited. A person in one group can never truly understand the experience of someone in another group.
The goal of rising above bigotry is naive. Bigotry and racism are permanent and indestructible components of American society.
Seemingly neutral principles of society – such as freedom of expression, academic freedom, academic integrity and meritocracy – are tools that can be powerfully used to maintain their power.

There are many teachers and administrators who believe that they best serve society by not being open, curious and seeking the truth, but by promoting this ideological framework.

A passage from a DEI Curriculum Guide symbolizes to me the way ideological activism replaces intellectual research as the primary mission of universities. It is for the faculty of the California Community Colleges and advises: “Be careful not to ‘weaponize’ academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to hinder equity.” In other words: spreading a specific ideology is more important than scientific integrity.

Students have been given the message that they are not on campus to learn; they are there to express their certainties and put forward a rigid ideological formula.

One result is that universities have become battlefields. Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America, which has worked on approximately 1,200 campuses over the past two decades to reduce toxic divides and build bridges between people of all faiths and no faith. Over the decades, he has come to the conclusion that this ideology does not demonize, humiliate and divide students, but creates a healthier, more equitable campus. It demeans white people by reducing them to a single category: the oppressor. Meanwhile, for example, it humiliates Muslim people of color, like Patel, by reducing them to victims.

Patel does not believe we should try to “end DEI,” as some have suggested. That’s not going to happen anyway. Furthermore, in a liberal society we defeat bad ideas with better ideas. Patel does argue that we are at a paradigm-shifting moment where we can replace a destructive form of diversity, equality and inclusion with a better form – one that actually includes people, rather than excludes them.

The right intellectual framework for effective diversity work is pluralism. Pluralism begins with a celebration of the fact that we live in one of the most diverse societies in history. The university’s task is to help young people from different backgrounds learn to work and live together. (Would you really want to hire someone who spent their college years learning to demonize, humiliate, and divide?)

Pluralists seek to replace the demonizing, demeaning, and divisive ethos with one that encourages respect, relationships, and cooperation. Pluralists believe that people’s identities are complex and fluid, that most people should not be divided into good/evil categories, that we become wise when we adopt many different points of view. Patel says universities should not be battlefields, but potluck dinners, where all guests bring their own cuisine to the communal table.

Donors who are offended by what is happening on campuses today should not stop funding universities. They must fund pluralistic programs that offer an alternative to and critique of the currently prevailing ideology. There is a rich tradition of thinkers exploring diversity, identity and history through a pluralistic framework: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Danielle Allen, John Courtney Murray, Miroslav Volf, Jonathan Haidt. Entire courses could be built around these ideas.

There is also a series of books about the social and moral skills you need to see people across differences, by people like Amanda Ripley, Mónica Guzmán and yours truly. There are already programs like the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy and Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute and its Greater Good Science Center. Patel suggests that universities could appoint a Chief Cooperation Officer, a senior individual whose responsibility is to help diverse communities work together, for example on joint service projects.

In recent decades, the crude ideology sweeping through American society has taken advantage of the fact that some people prefer to view the world through Manichaean us/them categories. Now is the time for donors, faculty, students, parents and all others involved in higher education to support the pluralistic counterbalance that truly practices inclusion, celebrates complexity, promotes collaboration and leads to social justice.