February 8, 2024 - 9:25pm
Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday.
Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, identity politics and what he calls the obsession with “safetyism” that has gripped Gen Z in the past decade. Haidt, a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and founder of the Heterodox Academy, an academic organisation committed to the ideals of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom.
On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews. Indeed, the antisemitic eruptions on campus, and subsequent Congressional testimony of three elite university presidents who waffled on genocide, was “probably the most important turning point in the history of American higher education,” Haidt stated.
Haidt characterised those events as the logical consequence of DEI, or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which emphasises one’s identity and encourages people to think in terms of power dynamics between the privileged and the oppressed. The professor described people who see the world exclusively through the lens of power dynamics as “monomaniacs,” and said they are the ones who run the campus DEI apparatus.
He said he used to think that some parts of DEI might make sense, but now it’s clear that DEI does not work, and often makes things worse by exacerbating racial hostilities. He continued:
Haidt argued that things have gotten so bad they are beyond repair and need to be jettisoned. Since many universities are not likely to take those steps on their own, they may have to be pressured to do so. Haidt even suggested that Republican legislatures should intervene in running public US universities as a means of “counter-pressure” against universities.
“I think we’ve dug ourselves in a hole, especially with the studies departments, where there is no way to reform them [but] from the outside,” Haidt said.
As an example of one possible approach, Haidt mentioned UNC’s newly created School for Civic Life and Leadership, which was promoted by UNC’s GOP-dominated board of trustees. “Boy, does America need that,” Haidt said. “Imagine if you’re an employer and you can employ either someone who’s an Anthro major, who majored in protest, versus someone who went to this school. Who’re you gonna employ? So I think some of the moves have been very positive.”
However, Haidt warned that creating such programmes to promote pluralism and the pursuit of truth must not be done in a ham-fisted way that will create faculty opposition and foment bitterness. “Now, in a culture war, if you do it in a heavy-handed way, you’re going to cause a strong reaction from the faculty,” he said. “You need procedural fairness: that is the importance of people seeing that whatever’s happening is done by a legitimate process”.
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SubscribeIt is worrying that someone as eminent and scholarly as Professor Haidt still does not get it. There is a constellation of NGOs, foundations, and regulatory agencies in Western countries that provide a viable career path for all of those Anthro majors who majored in protest. DEI cannot be abolished. It has reached critical mass and is self-sustaining. The only way it will end is if the West is hit with an existential crisis, where we are forced into a stark choice between competence and annihiliation. There are no DEI coordinators in foxholes.
Not necessarily. If you think of the DEI hegemony in similar terms to the hegemony that the Catholic Church held over people’s lives and institutions up to the early Modern period, the church didn’t lose its grip due to one identifiable existential crisis but several factors across several countries, including its own dogmatism, intransigence and incompetence.
There’s no such thing historically as a self-sustaining movement, given the pressure of forces external to it. Certainly, if actors such as China or Iran were to apply further pressure (a process that looks to have gained some impetus recently) then the potential for ‘annihilation’ – even in the cultural rather than physical sense – could come into play; but even without such threats, cultural intransigence has never been sustainable.
I suspect we’re just at the very beginning of being ‘re-awakened from the woke’.
Great comment and important perspective. DEI isn’t a monolithic movement that can never be stopped. If businesses start losing money because of it, they will abandon it, or be displaced by better performing companies. NGOs would be crippled if govt’s simply stopped funding them and introduced regulations. Nothing is inevitable.
The analogy with the Catholic Church is not very reassuring. The Church had well over a millennium of dominance in Europe before the Reformation limited its power and reach. Even then it was utterly dominant in the Catholic countries of Europe. Take Ireland as a case in point. The absolute high point of the Catholic Church lasted from after the famine in around 1850 to around 1990. That’s 140 years of the Church inserting itself into Education, Health, and the Law. Ireland was a poor country at the time, so these weren’t some luxury beliefs to be jettisoned when the interest rates got too high. This was the absolute core faith of the society. And the Church never managed to insert itself in the Universities the way DEI has done (although it did try). If the Church had managed that feat, there is a fighting chance it would still be in the ascendancy today.
Based on past analogy, I see 3 ways for DEI to die:
An existential crisis such as a large-scale war between the West and China, Iran, Russia, or some combination of the threeThe rise of a disruptive technology, the way the printing press stopped the Catholic Church in Germany in the ReformationA collapse of DEI under the weight of its own contradictions, such as the competency crisis that is currently hollowing out Western engineering and other complex systems.If the third happens, it will happen like the bankruptcy described by Hemmingway: slowly at first, but then very suddenly.
I think you are right. One important point is that the public in general has not been won over to the new orthodoxy., though they may pay lip service in order to avoid More and more crazy unintended consequences are getting harder and harder to suppress and then underlying incoherence of the ideology is a repressed that will keep on returning.
Yup. The other day I talked with a young woman who studied anthropology. She now works in an NGO on climate change, sigh.
Ugh.
What’s the problem with that?
The problem is, that every cent spent on “raising awareness” about climate change is a cent not spent on engineers, solar-panel installers, and nuclear-fusion scientists, i.e. the ones who can actually do something about climate change.
Climate change is a completely natural phenomenon so ‘combatting’ it is like ranting at the clouds because it is raining. A big waste of time, money, and energy. Unfortunately, many simple-minded people believe that the earth is safer if human flourishing is reined in by big government and mega-corporations who we can trust to ‘save’ us from climate change. It’s almost like a religion in that failure to take it seriously makes you a heretic in some circles. At the furthest extremes is the belief that destroying ancient artifacts in museums or radically depopulating the planet will save humanity.
There are some, like myself, that would prefer to take my chances with climate change than have a body of highly-paid ‘experts’ telling me how to live frugally. If I find that the oceans have risen to the level of my attic, I will most likely pack up and live elsewhere. No biggy.
Money has been cheap the past two decades. Cheap money is how all these useless departments and institutions have been able to exist. Times are getting tougher and this will lead to less cash being funneled into NGOs, and companies will start cutting costs where it hurts the least. I think this is what will kill institutional wokeness. We will see a lot of smug people taken down a couple notches soon and I for one can’t wait to have my burger and fries served by their kind.
There are a couple things you can do; suspend govt funding to all schools with DEI dpts, and install new board of directors at public universities. For private institutions, you can suspend govt funding and start taxing endowments – although that should be done regardless.
I suspect that the eradication of DEI intiatives is necessary, but not sufficient, in order to turn universities around. There is also the problem of the number of faculty in “activist” areas. As another poster, Mr Ó Náraigh, has pointed out, there is demand for their courses because there are career paths for for those majoring in activist subject. It is unrealistic to think that they will be expunged from universities and time soon. The only hope is to somehow quarantine them.
I suspect that this article is completely false. Where does Haidt actually say anything about DEI? I think he just made it up knowing that the sheep at Unherd just love this kind of stuff.
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which emphasises one’s identity and encourages people to think in terms of power dynamics between the privileged and the oppressed.”
This, for instance, is utter nonsense and is simply this biased writer’s feelings about DEI.
You appear to going through a bit of an identity crisis yourself.
Perhaps you have a persecution complex, as we used to call it? Failing that an inferiority complex perhaps?
The product of a light education where having the correct attitude toward certain issues is more important than having real workable ideas. Unfortunately there are tens of thousands like him, a lot of them in charge of our modern institutions which explains the current leadership crisis. He would be better off on a comment site like Reddit where you can safely express contempt at institutionally-designated out-groups while blocking and banning those who challenge your worldview. For all his sneering ramblings, I believe Champers is merely disguising his abject fear in the face of a world that is rapidly changing and no longer conforming to his deeply-held beliefs. I picture him very much like the Gollum-character in Lord of the Rings desperate to regain their Precious.
I think “right side of history” fanaticism isn’t all that different from being, say, a Man U fan in the end. The more the devotion, the better the validation and highs – as long as your team is winning at least.
You’re completely unhinged from reality, what’s it like for you being in a cult?
Your comment has made me smile. Whilst a very, very long way back the original thoughts on this had some merit for discussion about not power dynamics essentially but where and were there, voices speaking for minority groups in groups and corporations who held the power for decision making. This was important for our community, state and nations to make informed decisions which affect ALL of us. However, the DEI and extreme left have taken over the narrative and become the very axiom of power and rage that they complained about in the first place.
The part you are missing is that as individuals, regardless of race, creed, religion or colour, we are PART of a much larger whole. To think otherwise, makes everyone who thinks this way into their own righteous God. It is also self-delusional. This thinking fractures everyone off into a million pieces and keeps breaking down. I liken it to a cancer diagnosis. What is cancer but an acceleration and multiplication of healthy cells into the possibility of a terminal death.
If it keeps going this way, the end result is possible death. It then will be too late to salvage what it is we have actually lost.
I understand your consternation: divide and rule has been the central MO of champagne socialists since the 1920s. But basic human solidarity will always win in the end.
I think it’s more accurate to say that basic human cooperation or “solidarity” has never been conclusively defeated yet. Unfortunately, it does not always win. Versions of champagne socialism and mean, soft-handed traditionalism have existed for much longer than a hundred years or so. Not that this is news to you.
Divide and conquer/misrule is not the exclusive strategy of the Left.
“On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews.”
Somewhat self-serving there, Professor Haidt. I suppose we can be glad that you’ve seen the light, though.
Are you suggesting that, in wishing to have demonstrators stop chanting “Death to Jews” (or whatever), Prof. Haidt has a conflict of interest? !!
My read of this is that he is using the latest stuff on campus as an example of the unreformability of colleges, rather than a game-changing event. Though I admit the text seems to suggest that.
But even so. The fact that you don’t wake up to the terror until the tyrant comes for you is not hypocrisy.
An examination of historical precedents reveals how political groups often emerge in response to systemic exclusions and adversities. This can be observed in various instances: the denial of Jewish people from academic institutions, the imposition of redlining and Jim Crow laws on African Americans, and the ostracization of the LGBTQ+ community during the AIDS crisis. These events have catalyzed the formation of more cohesive and sustainable communities that have yielded tangible outcomes. From my perspective, DEI initiatives are not merely products of contemporary “woke” culture (and the blame often on black Americans is laughable and extremely misleading hatred). Contrary to what some may believe, this is a significant connection to immigration policies. It is problematic to invite the most educated and wealthiest individuals from other nations only to relegate them to a secondary status upon arrival without any chance at power. While it is convenient to concentrate on the achievements of African Americans, who have made remarkable strides in integrating into and influencing American culture without “initiating” a civil war (there is no any other country in the world where a group such Black Americans survived in such spectacular way – none from slavery to an integral part of the culture all while still a real minority without generational wealth – Digest that for a second!), it is crucial to acknowledge the broader implications. The irony is if America did not treat its real citizens (black Americans and indigenous groups) in such respectful and share wealth/power then you cannot expect other groups who had wealth and power in their countries to accept just being the fillers of capitalistic society. This is stupid! It is quite obvious and extremely impossible to put the cat back in the bag!
The notion that businesses will cease their DEI initiatives is fundamentally misguided. At its core, DEI aims to disrupt traditional power dynamics through technological advancements in an increasingly interconnected global landscape. Although DEI emerges as a consequence of globalization and corporate practices, its perception among the general populace is often misunderstood, being seen as a concept focused solely on races. DEI transcends mere considerations of racial or skin-based differences (though perhaps that might have been its initial spark); it is, in essence, a process dedicated to fostering equality (think of Tiktok vs Facebook). This pursuit is not as visible or tangible as some may believe, but its ultimate goal diverges significantly from common misconceptions, focusing not merely on surface-level diversity but on the equitable distribution of opportunities and resources globally! To rephrase my aim: The businesses will become DEI globally regardless of its people!
DEI will become the most powerful political group in our lifetime because precisely the reasons I noted above. That is the fear, the political aspect of it not its academia which was only its means not its end.
To elaborate on my argument, given the challenge of shifting the prevalent mindset, it is noteworthy that several prominent organizations (Alphabet, MS, Twitter, Chanel, IBM, OnlyFans ++++) are led by individuals of color who, though not born in the US, have received their education there. These positions are power that will drip downwards with or without our little tantrums!
This exemplifies the DEI efforts I am referring to – not merely the appointment of minority individuals without significant influence, who possess degrees in anthropology and are unjustly stereotyped as having been trained in protest – but to completely shape the business world globally. This reductionist view is not only myopic but also contributes to the conflation of reality with propaganda. DEI strives to transcend the mere focus on the financial bottom line, advocating for equity beyond mere economic considerations. In engaging in disputes centered around the bottom line, we inadvertently play into the narrative of being “useful idiots,” distracted from the broader, more meaningful goals of DEI initiatives. Ask yourself a critical question: why now? Rather than I am feeling uncomfortable and will acting out!
Do not be surprised if DEI shows up dressed differently tomorrow!
DEI didn’t come into being in a vacuum. It’s pretty much a result of the extension of civil rights legislation of the 60s in America. This is probably why it’s having a harder time getting similar traction elsewhere except where America has a strong influence e.g. UK but not France. Given this, unwinding of DEI would probably need legislative changes.
Thank all that is good and light for this man…
The logical trajectory of DEI is the destruction of so called oppressor groups.