“DEI” is hot—or perhaps the verb should be plural, DEI are hot, as each letter stands for its own nominal concept: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This trinity of fair dealing designed to limit the damage inflicted by decades of white prejudice is potentially applicable to many aspects of personal and social life; but just at the moment it is especially current in discussions of higher education, and more especially in relation to the racial categories of students accepted by institutions of higher learning and to the racial compositions of college faculties. Oversimplifying only slightly, the aspiration of the DEI regime would be to achieve a social mix of both students and faculty that would reflect approximately the same ethnic profile on campus as is to be found in the general population. At the moment roughly 14% of our American population is of African and 6 or 7% of Asian ancestry.
I would be happier with the slogan if its last term were to be inclusivity rather than inclusion. My preference is not wholly based in euphony. That slight change would underscore the revolutionary aim of the project by echoing the rhythms of the motto of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité—an inspiring motto still prominent on thousands of public buildings in France. But the really problematic English term is equity, a word used with differing connotations. Its most general sense, fairness, is one to which we can all subscribe. But to some who are advancing the DEI regime equity is taken to promise equality of outcomes. It is one thing to guarantee an equable opportunity of access to an open competition and another to foreordain the results to conform to skin-color statistics.
The latter, mind you, is by no means an indefensible position. The dream of absolute social equality, though never achieved, lies latent in the democratic dogma. The distribution of physical prowess, mental acuity, skills and talents is not uniform among the human race; but it would be at least theoretically possible to make a social division of the world’s material goods on grounds of strict equality. One of the famous apothegms of Karl Marx is that allotment of resources should be made on a socially equable basis: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Such a revolutionary redistribution of material resources might seem to guarantee that no one could be “born on third base” because there would be no bases. That situation might last as long as fifteen minutes.
The History of the French Revolution by Jules Michelet, still among the most famous books devoted to what is probably the defining cultural event of Western modernity, surprisingly begins with an essay in historical theology: “Concerning the religion of the Middle Ages”. This may seem curious. The historian had abandoned Christian belief early and was a ferocious enemy of the Jesuits. In his introductory chapter Michelet contrasts the discarded medieval world as a regime of grace (as in “grace and favor”) with a regime of revolutionary justice. Many well-meaning enthusiasts of DEI seem to think of equity as justice in Michelet’s sense. But for me the historical evidence of the results of the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions suggests that the theory leads to neither equity nor to justice but to the annihilation of the specific individual in the sea of statistical abstraction. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, one of the truly consequential novels of the twentieth century, is perhaps the most forceful literary amplification of the idea in practice. Koestler’s French publisher changed its title to Le Zéro et l’Infinie—Zero and Infinity--the individual being nothing, and the “masses” everything. This is a point developed in one of the more philosophical moments in a dialogue between the doomed central character and his NKVD interrogator.
I stick with the now embattled idea that when all is said and done, human beings are to be judged, in Martin Luther King’s famous phrase, “on the content of their character.” To do so is to acknowledge individual merit. One of the best-selling American writers of the later nineteenth century was Horatio Alger, and although few people today have read any of his books, his name is still known by many as a specialist in the rags-to-riches plot. The typical Alger hero was a young man who by his pluck, talent, and industry overcame the disadvantaged circumstances of his origins to achieve material and social success. This has been called “bootstrap capitalism,” but it always depends upon a Helping Hand. The Horatio Alger template is partly hokum, but only partly. In my experience it is more convincing than the oppressor-oppressed model. But of course we all tend to turn our individual life experience into a useful social template. I want to consider myself a meritocrat. Surely we all want to consider ourselves meritocrats.
A great deal has changed since I was young. To judge from the press it is now something newsworthy to be the first college graduate in your family. It was common among my contemporaries. The “GI Bill” alone must have expanded the sociology of American college graduates hugely. I remember being at a conference of Danforth Fellows in the late 1950s. This was a group of highly select doctoral students in the humanities bankrolled by a midwestern foundation established by an agricultural tycoon. At our conference the Harvard Dean of Arts and Sciences (a job of storied eminence later held by Claudine Gay on her rise to the presidency) said in a lecture to the assembled fellows that the great challenge facing American higher education in the 1960s and 70s would be producing PhDs rapidly enough to meet the ever-expanding need for more college professors. Could this be done at scale while sustaining true standards of excellence? We felt we were part of a large wave of dynamic, positive social change. Even Homer nods, but I personally still feel that way.
In the polemical atmosphere both evidenced and exacerbated by the de facto firing of Harvard’s president it is not surprising that academic DEI regimes are loudly defended as effective instruments of social justice by one group and decried as gravy trains for race hustlers by others. But the debate, if one can dignify it with that name, is likely to be unproductive so long as the credentialed proponents of “diversity” think that word means “more people who think just like me.”
