Harvard's DEI Dilemma

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Frank S. Zhou 0:00
We have a special Newstalk episode for you today. Because as Harvard becomes increasingly wrapped up in national debates about diversity, equity and inclusion. Today we get to hear from two students living it on campus right now. Two members of The Crimson's Editorial Board join us to discuss free speech on campus, how it all relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion, whether students feel comfortable talking about their opinions in class, and where we're all headed next. Here's the episode.

As Harvard navigates its way out of a historic leadership crisis, DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — has come under heavy fire. And it's happening all over the country. Across university campuses:

News Anchor 1 0:44
The University of Florida slashing all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion roles across campus workplaces.

News Anchor 2 0:51
The airlines are in a mad scramble to meet equity targets, meaning they are pushing safety aside in favor of ideology.

Frank S. Zhou 1:00
And Harvard.

News Anchor 3 1:02
Claudine Gay is officially out at Harvard. But the fight over DEI has only just begun.

Frank S. Zhou 1:09
DEI, critics say is also about free speech. The idea that principles of diversity, equity and inclusion hinder students from speaking freely and openly on campus. But the thing is, when people talk about DEI, a lot of times they don't have the same idea of what DEI is.

News Anchor 4 1:28
It's new and novel and not universally defined.

Frank S. Zhou 1:31
But here's what we can define. As Harvard debates the boundaries of free speech, out of Harvard's class of 2023, more than 65% surveyed were progressive or very progressive, only 12% conservative or very conservative, and 22% moderate. The University has a set of DEI offices, including the central office for equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging that deals with university-wide programming, and individual school units that provide students services, like the college's Office of BGLTQ student life and the Women's Center. But life on campus isn't always as people outside describe it to be today on Newstalk, two members of The Crimson's Editorial Board join us to talk about DEI and free speech at Harvard, what people tend to get wrong, how students feel about expressing their opinions in class, and what they say might be a way out of the firestorm. From the Harvard Crimson, I'm Frank Zhou, this is Newstalk.

Allison P. Farrell 2:32
Hi, I'm Allison Farrell. I'm a Crimson Editorial editor.

Tommy Barone 2:42
And I'm Tommy Barone. I'm a Crimson Editorial Chair.

Frank S. Zhou 2:44
Thank you so much, Allison, and Tommy for joining us. So let's get the lay of the land to start: what is DEI in the first place?

Tommy Barone 2:52
I think it's worth thinking of DEI in the context of two distinct, but related ideas. The first is the kind of loose set of principles that aim toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. And then there is the bureaucratic instantiation of those principles.

Allison P. Farrell 3:09
Yeah, I would agree with everything that Tommy just said. But I think when we think about why we have a three letter acronym, it's because we do need to do more than just make sure people have the resources they need, we have to really work proactively to ensure that everyone feels as though they're part of the group, everyone feels capable of taking advantage of the resources presented to them.

Frank S. Zhou 3:28
So this feeling of belonging and of inclusion, I don't think there's disagreement on the grounds that people should feel belonging in a community like Harvard, but there are many, many critics of DEI. And I wonder if we could walk through some of the biggest and loudest of those criticisms.

Tommy Barone 3:43
The loudest end is people like Chris Rufo or Elyse Stefanik. Right-wing and new right politicians who have latched on to DEI as their latest case study in the way that the left has got a rise. So Harvard was once the nation's preeminent university. And suddenly it's been invaded by these radical left-wing thinkers. You've seen excellence go out the window and this kind of Orwellian doublespeak language that no one's ever heard of that turns people against each other. That's the standard right-wing criticism. And then I think there's a second group of criticisms which are more academic, typically coming from a left or center-left perspective, often they come from professors — people inside the gates. One of the main criticisms is that DEI can feed a culture of censoriousness on one hand or on the other hand, can engage in this kind of ineffectual box checking that can turn people against each other in some cases without really delivering on substantive improvements in metrics that we should care about.

Allison P. Farrell 4:45
And I think to an extent DEI has become a symbol of something feared by the right wing that threatens the very way they envision our country. We have to be careful to not engage with the phantasm of DEI as if that is really what DEI is. We have to engage with it as a mischaracterization.

Tommy Barone 5:02
I agree with Allison's characterization that to a substantial extent, both groups of critics are really thinking of their standing issues with institutions, and then are conjuring DEI as a representation of those criticisms. That's why I think it's important to point out that many times, these are facets of a school's culture that are being critiqued rather than a particular bureaucratic apparatus.

Frank S. Zhou 5:27
So let's dive deep then into Harvard culture — if you could even assign one staple label for that in the first place. What are the critiques that tend to get lumped under the DEI umbrella here?

Tommy Barone 5:38
I think that one: an understanding that people have perhaps become too interested in one's own status as a victim in understanding things that are uncomfortable or difficult or divisive, as harmful, as threatening. For example, you'll enter a lot of conversation in the dining hall or in clubs or in classes where someone has a position that is maybe center or left roughly the middle of the country, usually not something on the right, because there's very few conservative students here. And it's, you'll immediately hear rustling in the room, and you see students look at each other. And often if a student who disagrees with that person is particularly outspoken, they'll say something like, 'I think that's pretty crazy.' Or 'I think that that's an insane thing to say.' And I think that drawing of narrower and narrower lines about what is appropriate, and what deserves social sanction actually does exert a meaningful, although not all-consuming, chilling effect on college campuses. And I do think it's worth having a conversation about whether that's gone too far.

Allison P. Farrell 6:35
I think though — and maybe you have some personal experience to counter this — that I just haven't experienced that necessarily. I haven't really seen many instances where people who express centrist certainly positions are met with rebuke of any kind.

Tommy Barone 6:50
I think most Harvard students would agree that they would feel totally uncomfortable expressing a conservative position in a lot of social settings. And I think the fact that that's the case suggests that Harvard does have a problem.

Allison P. Farrell 7:01
But I do think though, at the same time, you expressed that opinion, and I think many other people would have as well. So I think there might be a difference, we have to draw between when opinions might be uncomfortable to express, or you acknowledge that they're unpopular. And when those opinions seem to come with a real threat of retribution of some kind, whether social or other.

Tommy Barone 7:23
I think if retribution were the bar, then we have a pretty weak commitment to free speech. At the end of the day, it's there are very few cases where classroom discussions are going to end up in a revoked job offer or a rejection from a social organization or something like that. In truth, the sanction is social, it's about how your peers look at you. And if you're in a room, and if you don't have a view that you're incredibly passionate about on a given subject, it is easier by far to keep quiet about the subject than to engage and have people's opinions about you shift. And it's fine for us to take this position that people should just sort of toughen it up and deal with it and say their opinions anyway. But in practice, I think it's almost certainly true, that that's not what happens. And so far as that's the case that there has been a real significant shifting of the goalposts in what's appropriate to say on college campuses, we have to reevaluate our culture so as to achieve something that is more tolerant of viewpoint diversity.

Allison P. Farrell 8:18
And I don't disagree with anything you just said. However, I think there are a lot more opportunities for disagreement than we give credit for at Harvard. There are inflated fears of what one will experience if you express an unpopular opinion around your peers.

Frank S. Zhou 8:31
We could talk about the oftentimes hard-to-pin-down social repercussions. I want to bring us back to the connective tissue to DEI specifically, right, to what degree is what you've mentioned — is social repercussions — a direct result of DEI?

Tommy Barone 8:46
I think there's an interesting debate to be had about whether this is related to either DEI as a loose philosophy or di as a bureaucratic instantiation. At the end of the day, there are very few people on campus whose lives are really shaped all that much by bureaucratic DEI — by the physical bodies that represent Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Harvard. Nevertheless, those organs of the administration do signal what is approved by the powers that be on some levels. In practice, it has allowed some portions of its bureaucracy to take positions that have some degree of tension with a commitment to free speech, academic freedom.

Frank S. Zhou 9:31
What would some of those positions be? Where do you see these moments of institutional intervention as overstepping?

Tommy Barone 9:38
There are some trainings that students are required to undertake every year — I really don't think that they're so significant, but it is worth thinking about — that have a graph which is called, I think, a wheel of oppression or there's like a levied axes across which you can be oppressed. And there are very thorough and specific explanations of the way in which those aspects of your identity can be oppressive. There is a real attunement to the very, very specific subcategories of identity that can, in their own unique ways, be oppressed or hard or disadvantaged. And maybe there's some truth value to those things. But I do think that they're closely related to the culture of censoriousness, because it encourages people, I think, to silo themselves by identity, or by experience, to make these really proprietary claims to having a hold on the truth. So 'I come from this group, so I only I can speak on this group', which is also pretty counter to academic freedom and free discourse. And finally, the instincts to treat everyone as being either advantaged or disadvantaged in a really binary way can make it difficult to have respectful civil discourse across lines of difference, too.

Allison P. Farrell 10:49
And at the same time, though, I think it's a problem that can be solved through addition, not subtraction, I would hate to lose these frameworks. But instead, we need to add that element of civil discourse, the idea that these frameworks themselves are not set in stone, they're not commandments that have been given from above. They're things to be questioned ideas to be developed. And I think we have an important place in doing that as students here.

Frank S. Zhou 11:11
Even as we call for addition, though, we can't deny that the crisis on campus in the days after Hamas is October 7 attacks on Israel and the war in the Middle East that's broken out since it has split sharply along religious ethnic lines. And I'm curious to what degree do you see DEI as a factor in all of this? Christopher Rufo, as you mentioned, Tommy, clearly a critic of both critical race theory and DEI who's come out strongly in the wake of clouding gaze resignation. Where are we now in the wake of a leadership crisis at Harvard? And how does the I fit into that?

Tommy Barone 11:44
I think at the end of the day, the interesting and useful thing to critique is Harvard culture. And some critics are identifying aspects of Harvard culture when they talk about DEI, but I want to be really clear that people like Chris Rufo, are really just using this as an opportunity to further a long-running assault on two things, which is the independence of American education, one, which they view as a font of wokeness or something. And then secondly, odd, what accurate account day with America's long, and in many ways, very ugly racial history. So I think we need to be clear-eyed about that. At the same time, this episode of campus turmoil is a good case study in what's wrong with Harvard culture. I think we've seen vastly less attention, for example, paid to how we could have discourse about the underlying geopolitical issues here, and far more really combative, and often unproductive protest. I think that it's been really disappointing to see how each of the sides there always have been, I think, often very unreasonable have been on empathetic. The other side of that's not to take a preachy position. Although we're all students, we're all quite young. At the same time. I do think it suggests that Harvard culture has gotten excessively since censorious.

Allison P. Farrell 13:01
I agree, everything Tommy, you just said, there is a problem on Harvard's campus. And it's a problem of civil discourse, when we see the uptick in both anti-Arab and antisemitic conduct on Harvard's campus anti-Muslim sentiment. These are issues that diversity, equity and inclusion has the tools to solve. But civil discourse has to be in dialogue with DEI, it can't do without it. Neither can DEI do without civil discourse, part of the inclusion aspect of DEI in particular, is making all voices feel invited to the conversation and feeling safe speaking in it. So I'd ask that we turn to DEI as a way of solving a lot of these problems we've seen arise over the last several months.

Tommy Barone 13:41
I don't know in practice, I don't really think DEI does anything to further dialogue, to say nothing of whether the philosophy is opposed to free speech. If you look at the concrete offerings of Harvard's DEI infrastructure, I don't think it really has much to do with the response to hate on campus. I've seen no evidence that it's been part of that. And I also see no evidence that it has any involvement really at all in creating free speech on campus. I mean, we should all care about diversity, equity, and inclusion as concepts I've not sold that that's the solution or the way forward for Harvard, the way forward is ultimately how do we create a campus culture where people are not afraid to speak their mind, not constantly shouting other people down? And I really think that that requires a very intentional commitment to this part of students, reshaping our instincts with respect to how we respond to positions that we disagree with, it's really easy for us to slide into a posture of 'Ooh, like, I can't believe you said that', or 'that's a crazy position.'

Allison P. Farrell 14:40
Well that's exactly why I say diversity, equity and inclusion really is empty without civil discourse. And in a similar vein, civil discourse without DEI seems wholly irresponsible. We need to make sure that the barriers of access and participation are sufficiently low that those who want to participate can. Harvard's DEI culture hasn't been effective because they start from the top down. When we look at a massive institution like Harvard that has thousands of employees, thousnads of students, there's no way to actually affect the experience of those faculty of those staff, of the students, unless these things start at a much more grassroots level. I think that's the greatest failing of both of these problems at Harvard, we still need to work towards greater diversity, equity and inclusion, we still have to work towards greater civil discourse. But that can't start in an office. Yes, we should fund these offices, these programs. But that's not enough. It's barely scratching the surface of what we need to do if we want to build a community that is capable of civil discourse, and at the same time, includes a diverse array of individuals who feel able to access the conversation and participate in it fully.

Frank S. Zhou 15:47
A series of recent news items that have been wrapped up into conversations and critiques of DEI is black academics and administrators who have had allegations of plagiarism levied against them we've had four now across Harvard, and I'm curious how you see this fitting into the debate, if at all.

Tommy Barone 16:05
I think it's incredibly patently racist. The witch-hunting of black female academics is incredibly patently racist. If you read Chris Rufo's Twitter these days, he is actually just using DEI to be a pejorative for Black, which is incredibly distasteful.

Allison P. Farrell 16:25
I completely agree. I think it's part of the larger phantasm of DEI that's been created by the right-wing that somehow asserts that Dei, which stands in of course, for a slew of right-wing fears, is running universities. And what they've done is now taken women of color in particular, and chosen to use them as a scapegoat for their extreme misguided fears.

Frank S. Zhou 16:48
At the end of the day, all of us are Harvard students participating in a campus environment, whether we like it or not, that is under heavy scrutiny from oftentimes people beyond Harvard's campus and beyond Harvard's walls. If you had to name one misconception that conversations surrounding DEI have been saturated with, what would you say?

Tommy Barone 17:06
I think, one misconception that's particularly unuseful is the narrative that DEI in some way runs Harvard. And that's categorically untrue. I mean, if anything, DEI institutionally is one of the most peripheral aspects of the way, important decisions at Harvard are made. I think we could all differ as to whether that's a good thing. And there's plenty of room for legitimate criticisms of diversity, equity and inclusion. And so it's a little rich to hear that DEI runs Harvard when I think there's almost zero evidence that that is the case.

Allison P. Farrell 17:42
I think for me, it would be that Harvard is a complete echo chamber, right. There obviously is some ideological constriction. Maybe there might be an overabundance, shall we say, of people who are on left or at least liberal. But that doesn't mean that this is a complete echo chamber. I have good friends who are conservative, I have friends who are centrist. So friends who are liberal and yes, leftist. But that doesn't mean that we don't have a problem. It just means that I think the extent of the problem is overstated.

Tommy Barone 18:11
I think that it's important that we reject and call out ways of understanding the world and each other that drive us apart and elimintate or foreclose the possibility for meaningful discourse across difference.

Allison P. Farrell 18:24
For me, I'm just hopeful that we're able to take DEI for what it is — it's a set of beliefs about the world a lens of analysis of culture of social dynamics that has merit, and it's open to critique open to reformulation. I hope we're able to take DEI as students and faculty, the staff, and general public and see what makes our university, our community, our country a better place to be. I think there's a lot of potential there. And I think it's a question that's worth asking, how can we apply this framework to actually make the world better?

Frank S. Zhou 19:02
Thank you so much, Tommy and Allison, for joining us to chat about all things DEI, and where Harvard is headed next.

Tommy Barone 19:07
Thank you, Frank.

Allison P. Farrell 19:08
Thank you.

Frank S. Zhou 19:12
This episode of news talk was hosted by Frank S. Zhou and produced by Frank S. Zhou and Hailey E. Krasnikov. Our multimedia chairs are Julian J. Giordano and Addison Y. Liu. Oh, our editorial chairs are Tommy Barone, and Jacob M. Miller. Our president is J. Sellers Hill. News clips in this episode come from NBC, MSNBC, and Fox News. Music in this episode by Bea Wall Feng, from 14 Plympton Street, this is Newstalk.