DEI Inc: Why Students Get to Fire Professors

There's a financial reason why opponents of free speech and academic freedom get so much traction on campus.

Generated by Dall-E 2

As regular readers know, my Old Goats “ruminations” are supposed to be with…well, old goats — that is, people of wisdom and experience over age 60 or so. I’ve made exceptions, most recently in the case of Simon Rosenberg, age 58 at the time, who insisted last year on this site that there would be no red wave in the midterm elections and, of course, turned out to be right. I’m making another exception this week because I think it is so important for liberals to fight woke excesses that are bad for the country and make it harder for Democrats to fight back against the dangerous policies of Ron DeSantis et al and, ultimately, harder to win elections. One of those was the ridiculous firing of an art history professor at Hamline University for showing a famous work of art that depicted the Prophet Muhammad (in a flattering light, by the way). The faculty there rebelled against the firing, but it wasn’t until I read Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder’s fine piece in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” that I understood just how badly DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) has run amok. It turns out that much of the DEI impulse that gives right-wingers ammunition has its roots in money, more specifically competition for students, who can silence professors and even get them fired because “the customer is always right.” 

Amna Khalid is a (young!) Oxford-educated professor at Carleton College who specializes in modern South Asian history and the history of medicine. She grew up under military dictatorship in Pakistan, where she developed a strong interest in issues of censorship and free expression. As a Muslim, she was especially offended by the Hamline case.  She explains here how DEI and academic freedom are in tension, how the commercialization of higher ed has harmed the latter, and how we might strengthen efforts to push back. In a future edition, I’ll probe the alarming censorship and book banning that has come in reaction to DEI excesses.

 JONATHAN ALTER:

Before we get underway with questions about academic freedom in higher ed: What is your take on what Governor DeSantis is doing in Florida?

AMNA KHALID:

I think it's hideous, in a nutshell. And I actually just wrote a piece with Jeff [Jeffrey Aaron Snyder] in Persuasion that came out after The Chronicle of Higher Education piece. Jeff and I have a grant to look at legislation that's coming out in many red states to try and limit what can and can't be taught at colleges and universities. I take a very strong stance against state intervention in higher ed. Perhaps because I come from a country, Pakistan, where state intervention ruined public education, I’m very skeptical of it. And I think this intervention is highly politically motivated.

Amna Khalid, Associate Professor of History at Carleton College

JON:

I totally agree. At the same time, you and your coauthor make an argument that educational inclusion and academic freedom are at odds with each other, even though a recent Harvard study and several books have said that there's no tension between the two. Explain.

AMNA KHALID:

I believe there is a tension between academic freedom and inclusion. When I say inclusion, I mean the way inclusion is defined by what Jeff and I call DEI Inc. which is the dominant model on college campuses right now. If you frame inclusion as saying everyone should feel welcome and like they belong, that's untenable in any kind of pluralistic society — and especially in the academy [higher education], where the mission is education. You can't have everyone feel equal on every subject. For instance, people whose ideas have been debunked or who peddle conspiracy theories should not feel welcome in that environment. The core mission of the academy always has to be academic freedom, in order to ensure a good learning outcome and good research.

JON:

Has DEI become a racket?

AMNA KHALID:

When I say DEI Inc, it means something very particular. It means an approach to diversity, equity and inclusion coming out of a framework similar to Ibram X. Kendi’s anti-racism and ideas about who gets to speak and when, of the kind that Robin DiAngelo peddles in White Fragility. 

JON:

Just to clarify: diversity here doesn't refer to diversity of thought. It's strictly identity politics, right?

AMNA KHALID:

It is strictly identity politics. Occasionally, they will pay lip service to diversity of thought, but mostly it's demographic diversity that they want. I'm not against demographic diversity in the academy. It’s a worthwhile goal. But the ways it's being pursued are problematic.

JON:

How so?

AMNA KHALID:  

Well, another core component of DEI is the framework of harm: that harm is pervasive on college campuses and that claims of harm should have policy implications. I don't question that people can feel harmed; it is a very subjective experience. But the question is, what implications does the framework of harm have for institutional policies? In my latest piece, I argue that the point of education is not to reduce harm.

JON:

As the President of Wesleyan [Michael S. Roth] pointed out, nowhere in the Bill of Rights is there a right not to be offended. Is it the case that you cannot both have academic freedom for professors and a culture where students can trump academic freedom with their umbrage? Has there been a conflation of harm and feeling offended?

AMNA KHALID:

I go a step further. There's a bigger conflation — with discomfort. Some students will just be uncomfortable with something. And then they lay claim to being harmed as a way of contesting the situation. There’s this brilliant quotation from Hanna Holborn Gray, who was president of the University of Chicago, and the first woman Ivy League [acting] president [at Yale]: “We're not in the business of making you feel comfortable. We're here to teach you how to think.” 

JON:

What I found most fascinating about your piece is the customer satisfaction dimension to this story, which I hadn't thought of as being part of the academy.

AMNA KHALID:

It’s there. What we've seen over the past few decades is the corporatization of higher education — where the customer is always right, and where your job is to satisfy the customer. That model has infused higher education in large part because of growing administrative bloat, which is infecting all higher education now and which has undermined faculty co-governance in very significant ways.

What we see is a proliferation of Student Life offices and of these senior administrative positions — things like the VP of DEI and the VP of Inclusive Excellence, or whatever language they use for it. These offices are teaching an alternative curriculum on campus outside of the classroom. These people have far more access to students through their resident assistant or student workers. Already, orientation [at Carleton] is handled by Student Life. Faculty are never part of orientation, at least not on my campus. Increasingly, I hear that is the case at most institutions. By the time students come to us, even freshmen, they already have had a week of training by Student Life, telling them what you can and can’t say on campus, how you should conduct yourself. And of course, a freshman who’s entering a new situation is going to abide by that. You don't immediately come in and question the rules, if you're being told by an authority figure that these are the rules of engagement in this place.

So you have this alternative curriculum being taught, which is about managing the experience of students as if they were customers. Recently there was an article in The Chronicle that really gave me the chills because it explained how in five institutions, there is now a new senior administrative position for “managing experience.” They're now making forays into the curriculum —looking to manage that kind of experience students have on campus, including with their professors. What they’re promoting is a model where, when you're dissatisfied, you go and complain to a manager. And who is the manager for faculty? The senior administration. 

JON:

What I'm most concerned about on campus is weakness on the part of administrators who let the inmates run the asylum, who don't push back in defense of academic freedom and common sense. By failing to push back, they give fantastic ammunition to the other side for far worse abuses. That’s why I thought your article was so important. My question is: how does your community of scholars push back in a public way so that we can turn the corner on this cancel culture absurdity we're in right now on campus and elsewhere?

AMNA KHALID:

The fact of the matter is that a lot of tenured faculty have been complacent and have not been speaking up. There are not many people within the academy who are coming out strong against this, which is what gives Fox News and the likes of DeSantis ammunition. Solutions-wise, faculty need to speak up. I was thrilled when Hamline faculty actually did speak up and called for the resignation of the president because of her mishandling of the situation.

And we need greater protections for tenure. About 75 percent of the professoriate is adjunct and contingent faculty. They can't say much because their jobs, their livelihoods are on the line. The whole point of tenure is to protect you so that you can speak up. I'm one of the 25 percent that's left, and I consider it my responsibility as a tenured faculty member to speak up for those who can't.

I hope we are at a turning point where the faculty realize that there's a lot to lose and that we need to push back.

JON:

I think some of it is framing it properly. Academic freedom cuts across attacks from both the left and the right. Academic freedom means Ron DeSantis can't tell you what to teach and what to put in your syllabus. And academic freedom means that a student who's offended by you has no standing for any action to be taken against you, no matter how offended that student is. Save academic freedom from — I don't know what you would call it — if you said from DEI, would that be too confrontational?

AMNA KHALID:

No, why not? I would say it. Save academic freedom from the tyranny of DEI Inc.

JON:

I don't see DEI Inc. being pulled root and branch from within higher ed any time soon. It's become so entwined for commercial reasons that I'm not sure that it can be. But maybe it's possible to turn the whole idea of DEI, which basically is an acronym for “woke,” into something people want to avoid.

AMNA KHALID:

We always want a quick fix. This problem is [multifaceted]. There's administrative bloat. There's the economic imperative, there's the adjunctification of faculty [mass hiring of poorly-paid adjuncts], which erodes academic freedom, there's the undermining of shared governance. This is not a problem that arose overnight. It’s been years in the making. And I think some of the initial concerns for advancing DEI are valid. They're coming from a good place. They've just become dogma in a way that is untenable and that has become unquestionable. Nobody can contest their “truths.”

I'm very concerned about ed schools, and the kind of curriculum that ed schools teach. A lot of the administrators on campuses are coming out of ed schools. And ed schools are where this understanding of inclusion is pushed and where the idea of diversity is pushed, often in a very ideological fashion. 

“One problem is that we want a quick fix. This problem is [multifaceted]. There's administrative bloat. There's the economic imperative, there's the gentrification of faculty, which erodes academic freedom, there's the undermining of shared governance.”

JON:

All three ideas — diversity, equity and inclusion — sound good, so it's hard to totally discredit. I'm always trying to think practically about how it best plays out in the public conversation. It seems to me that rational people need a simple message that diversity, equity and inclusion are important goals but academic freedom and free speech must always take precedence.

Students at Hamline should have been told when they came into the dean's office, “Oh, I'm so sorry you're offended,” but “You need to respect academic freedom and free speech. You have the right not to take their class or to drop their class or march against them. But you do not have the right to impinge on their freedom.” Suppose it was turned into a freedom issue, rather than a “let's redefine DEI as something bad.” You're then on better rhetorical footing. Just let freedom ring.

AMNA KHALID:

We need a multi-pronged approach. No one thing will fix it. I do want to make a distinction between academic freedom and free speech. There is a difference between what rights students have versus faculty. See, free speech is the first amendment right to say whatever you want to say. It doesn't necessarily have to be right or wrong. Now, faculty don't have free speech. Faculty have academic freedom, which means that they have the right to publish research and teach independently of any kind of pressure. And that comes with academic responsibility. Academic freedom doesn't come by itself. You have to abide by the norms of your discipline. You can't be peddling nonsense. [Academic freedom] has become a bad word [in some circles]. It's taken to mean that people are mouthing off and saying whatever they want to say in the classroom. That's not what academic freedom is. It's actually a very carefully structured way of thinking about the speech of faculty.

JON:

What do you consider the nub of the offense by the Hamline administration?

AMNA KHALID:

The administration undermined academic freedom. As a professor, you have freedom to teach in your class. You don't egregiously go out and target students or offend people, but you teach responsibly, and in this case, the professor did it with such sensitivity and such care that I was astonished that anyone would even question it. As a historian, I found it dreadful that the administration should dictate whether you teach your primary source or not. Primary sources — that’s what that image was — are integral to what we historians do. We can't do our jobs without teaching our primary sources. And you can't limit our engagement with history according to what you decide is right or wrong. We have the expertise to decide what we're going to share with our students, and we put a lot of thought into it.

In Hamline’s case, they're interfering in a theological debate that they have no business interfering in and in doing so they privileged one version of Islam over others. They said, “That is the Muslim position,” which is bullshit. There are two billion Muslims, and not everyone subscribes to it. Why is it that we can see diversity within the Christian tradition, but we can't within the Muslim tradition?

JON:

Were you worried about being canceled? If that article had been written by Jeff Snyder [who is white] alone, things would have gone worse, right?

AMNA KHALID:

Possibly. People do get canceled in the academy. Big time. One reason I speak out is because it's become difficult for white people to speak up against the reigning dogma of DEI. I feel motivated to speak because I want to hold the feet of white liberals to the fire. Why are they silent while they do have power? People on the left need to re-embrace freedom of expression. Freedom of speech has always been an [important] weapon of the weak. Don't let them redefine the meaning of terms the way they've done with CRT.

JON:

White liberals are scared basically, and they're not used to being scared.

 AMNA KHALID:

There's nothing to be scared of.

JON:

They think there is something to be scared of: that they're going to lose their jobs and be canceled, like people they know.

AMNA KHALID:

Well, it's time for people to come together and push back. Fear begets fear. This is a moment where we need to just have a spine and stand up for principles. There are a lot of people of color — I hate that term — speaking up and pushing against this and yes, of course, they get taken more seriously than white people do. What ties our hands is fear. And once you let fear take hold, then it's the end. A siege mentality has never led to admirable outcomes.

JON:

I’ve heard that generally speaking the freshmen and sophomores are a little bit more jaundiced about woke politics than the juniors and seniors and that we might be entering a better cycle now. 

AMNA KHALID:

There's a great public intellectual and sociologist, Musa al Gharbi, who has a book coming out soon with Princeton University Press called We Were Never Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite. He's making the case that we may be at a turning point, where people are less and less keen on this. And I'm delighted by that. But it's not just about people. We do need structural changes for the academy to function properly. Faculty-shared governance has to be restored. For that to happen, we need to push public educational institutions to hire people on the tenure track.

Remember, too, that students are adults, and they also have minds of their own. And they're not just sitting there as blank slates waiting to be imprinted. It's very infantilizing to students—this idea that they need to be protected from rhetoric. Students should be outraged that they've been thought of like this. It's also disingenuous; this is not how students are. It's a caricature of what higher education is.

JON:

Thanks, Amna.