The campus DEI bureaucracy is a threat to free speech

Greg’s PBS NewsHour debater last week showed a lot of deflection, few facts

Greg appeared on the PBS NewsHour last week to debate the pluses and minuses of the DEI bureaucracy on campus. Taking the “pro” DEI office position was Dr. Shaun Harper, Founder and Executive Director of the USC Race and Equity center — and someone you may recall from Greg’s appearance on the Dr. Phil program in 2022.

Harper’s position is that “an institution loses its fidelity to its mission” when DEI offices in higher education are closed. “There are nearly 5,000 colleges and universities across the United States,” he said. “Most of them include some language in their missions about preparing students for citizenship in a diverse democracy and other commitments to offering and assuring an inclusive learning environment for all students.”

Harper goes on to argue that, rather than going too far, DEI offices don’t go far enough. “Students of color, most especially, are not feeling like colleges are as liberal and as welcoming and inclusive as the DEI obstructionists are claiming them to be,” he said, and added that DEI offices are often underfunded and unable to do the work they’re setting out to do.

You’ll, of course, notice the use of what Greg flagged during the segment as “more advanced insult technology,” which is used in place of making an actual argument. Harper referred to “diversity obstructionists” as being the problem on campus rather than the DEI bureaucracies themselves. He also predictably dismissed the incidents of clear violations of free speech and academic freedom on campus, which are a direct result of DEI bureaucracy, as mere “anecdotes.”

We have always bristled at the idea that the stories we talk about are all FIRE "anecdotes," as that's usually a way to reduce their significance to maybe just some story you heard secondhand at a party. In fact, these are well-researched, well-documented incidents that we call "cases" at FIRE — partly for the reason that at any time we could litigate practically any of them.

Indeed, First Amendment law is filled with “anecdotes”...that we now call “precedent.”  There are many well-documented cases of people whose rights have been violated that really do matter years, decades, and sometimes even centuries later.

Even still, we don’t just rely on well-documented examples of serious incidents. We also have plenty — and I mean plenty — of data, much of which Greg presented in the “The Coddling of the American Mind” with Jonathan Haidt, and in his most recent book with Rikki Schlott, “The Canceling of the American Mind.”

But first, let’s examine a few “anecdotes.”

DEI administrators are a consistent threat to free speech and academic freedom

In the debate, Greg quickly rattled off examples where DEI officials were part of the threat to free speech and academic freedom at schools like Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Syracuse, UMass Boston, UCLA, the University of Toledo, and others.

At some schools, DEI offices have spent years hounding professors who are guilty of little more than the audacity of dissent.

Administrators at Loyola University New Orleans spent two and a half years threatening economics professor Walter Block with termination based on accusations of general bias that, because they were not tied to any specific incident, he had no real opportunity to respond to. Block was subjected to  repeated DEI training sessions, during which a trainer said his “libertarian views may seem extreme to many.” All of the allegations seem based on his pedagogy which, under university policy, should have been protected — meaning the investigation should have been over before it started.

At the University of Central Florida, associate professor of psychology Charles Negy was investigated for months because students reported his tweets to a DEI office. The result was a 244-page report covering 15 years and involving 300 interviews. Negy was was given no specific notice of the contents of the report when asked to respond, and the report made arbitrary distinctions about which of his speech, exactly, was allegedly discriminatory:

According to the UCF investigation, it is protected speech to say that girl scouts preserve their virginity (p. 25), but not that women are attracted to men with money (p. 26). It is protected speech to say that Jesus was schizophrenic (p. 36), but unprotected to say that Jesus did not come into the world to die for everyone’s sins (p. 36). It’s protected to say that Islam is cruel and not a religion of peace (p. 107) but not that it is a toxic mythology (p. 35).

At Harvard, lecturer Carole Hooven was forced out in 2023 for having argued in a 2021 news segment that terms referring to biological sex are valuable educational tools. In her own words, she “described how biologists define male and female, and argued that these are invaluable terms that science educators in particular should not relinquish in response to pressure from ideologues.” After her segment, DEI task forces from her and other departments both made and received complaints until Hooven felt unable to function: “When I made it clear to the powers that be in my department that I felt I had no choice but to leave due to the lack of public support, nobody stepped up to provide it.”

And even when the investigations are shorter-term, they can be equally absurd. At UCLA, a professor was investigated for reading MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which contains the “n-word” twice (in case this was in doubt, the letter is critical of its use). At the University of Michigan, a music professor “stepped away” from teaching while DEI complaints were pending against him for showing the 1965 film version of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” starring Sir Laurence Olivier using skin-darkening makeup. The DEI office, which had considered investigating, decided not to once the professor left on his own accord. A Yale student was interviewed multiple times by DEI administrators for having sent a party invite to club members that used the term “trap house.” They pressured him to apologize, even suggesting his legal career might be impacted if he doesn’t. 

So maybe by a definition of “anecdote” that actually means “extremely well documented historical examples that could just as easily make case law,” then sure, these are anecdotes. It may be an anecdote when someone tells you at a dinner party that the local school won’t enroll Linda Brown in 1952 and instead wants to put her on a bus to a school further away. But it's a news story when it's covered and verified. And then it’s a precedent when, in 1954, the Supreme Court says you can’t segregate children like Linda in Brown vs. Board of Education. 

That’s how it works. It’s an anecdote when you hear about a girl who couldn’t wear an armband to protest the Vietnam war in 1965; it’s a precedent called Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District in 1969.  It’s an anecdote about a high school administrator searching a student’s purse for cigarettes in 1980; it’s the Supreme Court finding students have a right against being unreasonably searched in 1984’s New Jersey v. TLO.  It’s an anecdote when you hear that a school punishes a cheerleader for her Snapchat in 2017, and a precedent that schools can’t control off-campus speech by 2021’s Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. All our civil rights decisions were anecdotes that refused to be forgotten. 

Ultimately, all civil rights struggles boil down to the rights, freedoms, and agency of individuals. What determines whether we are a free society or not is whether we protect those rights at the individual level. Many unfree societies are happy in the aggregate — particularly the ones where dissenters have a way of being eliminated. (DEI offices have an “app” for that, too: Ideological filters on hiring, promotion, and even instruction itself. Amazing how happy everyone is, when no dissent remains.)

We’d also be remiss if we didn’t mention the lawsuit FIRE filed on behalf of six California Community College professors whose state regulations were forcing them to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This, to use the words of FIRE attorney Daniel Ortner, is “a totalitarian triple-whammy… The government is forcing professors to teach and preach a politicized viewpoint they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary, indiscernible line.” As the lawsuit states:

The DEIA Rules forsake debate for top-down conformity, requiring faculty to endorse contested concepts such as “anti-racism,” the view that individuals must advocate for race-conscious remedies in order to overcome systemic racism, or “intersectionality,” the view that human beings are primarily defined by overlapping group identities like race and sex. California Community Colleges’ new rules use the heavy hand of the government not to encourage debate about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility policies, but end it.

For instance, the DEIA Rules require faculty members to teach in a manner reflecting “DEIA and anti-racist principles” and “promote a race-conscious and intersectional lens.” Professors must also employ a “social justice lens” and a “collectivism perspective,” rather than an “individualist perspective.” The government warns professors not to “weaponize academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to impede equity” or “inflict curricular trauma on our students.”

Dr. Harper can try to sweep all of these cases under a rug called “anecdotes,” but he’s going to have a very tough time trying to stand on it.

And now…the data on DEI bureaucracy's effect on higher ed

During the PBS Newshour segment, Dr. Harper said that the backlash to DEI on campus is “not based on robust samples of thousands and millions of students and higher ed workers.”

Well, let’s start with a robust sample of thousands of students. (If Dr. Harper is aware of samples of millions of students and higher ed workers, we’d love to work with those!) 

Over at the Missing Data Depot, Kevin Wallsten combined two sources of data: FIRE’s 2022 Student Free Speech Rankings survey, and a 2021 Heritage Foundation report measuring the scope of the DEI bureaucracy. There were 71 schools overlapping in the dataset, with most schools having more than 200 students in its individual sample. Some takeaways: “[T]he greater the relative size of the DEI bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students feel expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students in the campus ‘quad, dining hall, or lounge’ (r=.49, p=.00).”

Also, in KW’s words (and graph): 

As Figure 15 shows, the size of a university’s DEI bureaucracy is positively correlated with the overall number of topics students find it difficult to discuss “openly and honestly” (r=.36, p=.00). Students seem, in other words, to find it challenging to talk to each other about a larger set of issues when their universities employ a relatively large number of DEI personnel.

Being afraid to talk to each other, and particularly afraid to talk about difficult topics, undermines much of the value of a college education. Paying for a school with more DEI administrators is intellectual nouvelle cuisine; the more you pay, the less you get.

For some faculty members, that's a positive thing about DEI efforts — and that gets into the idea of some faculty preferring DEI offices. In a recent piece for Reason Magazine, Greg and Rikki discuss a phenomenon they call “The Conformity Gauntlet,” which describes the seemingly unending series of pressures and barriers to entry in academia for anyone who doesn’t conform to the ideological orthodoxy. Greg and Rikki also mention a forthcoming study of faculty where 23% of participants agreed both that diversity, equity, and inclusion are important variables to consider in faculty hiring, and that DEI statements are subtle political litmus tests.

In other words, nearly a quarter of professors know that DEI statements in hiring are contributing to institutions leaning further left, and are in favor of it. We’re not sure what’s scarier; the obvious ideological bias, or the fact that they proudly admit to having it. Perhaps this is why Dr. Harper seems to have such a difficult time seeing the issue: it’s the water he and his fellow academics are happily swimming in, and fish never know they’re wet.

States looking at legislative solutions must not limit academic freedom

We at FIRE oppose DEI statements because they serve as political litmus tests and obviously threaten free speech and academic freedom on campus. It makes sense to take action against them, but lawmakers must tread carefully. FIRE proposed legislation called the Intellectual Freedom Protection Act to show how concerned elected officials can prohibit political litmus tests on campus without also violating the First Amendment.

But of course, not everyone followed that advice. There have been various attempts at legislation that also violate freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus, such as Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act.” FIRE sued and defeated this “positively dystopian” (to use the federal court’s language) law in district courts, and the decision is currently on appeal.

Some states are looking specifically at measures to limit the size of the DEI bureaucracy. Utah, for example passed a law in January limiting DEI training and the scope of DEI offices. 

On Feb. 13, the Kentucky State Senate passed a version of a bill that has some clauses that, arguably, could impact in-classroom instruction. FIRE is working to ensure that any language that threatens academic freedom is cut from bills in Kentucky, and we'll oppose those bills until the language is removed.

As FIRE has argued, there’s a difference between legislative efforts to tamp down on DEI bureaucracy and attempts to limit or prohibit what can be taught or discussed in class. In keeping with our First Amendment principles, we are constantly monitoring legislation across the country to ensure that efforts to rein in campus DEI bureaucracies don't burden academic freedom or free expression.

Speaking of paying more

During the PBS NewsHour segment, Dr. Harper mentioned that “the research makes painstakingly clear” that “the overwhelming majority of [students] do not feel like they're being indoctrinated.” He didn’t mention what research, or where we can find it — but he did ask “those who recklessly claim that there's just all of this indoctrination,” in effect, for evidence of those claims.

We agree with Dr. Harper: There is little evidence that DEI efforts indoctrinate students, mostly because there’s no evidence DEI efforts do much of anything except generate a lot of “anecdotes” and redistribute a great deal of money. How much? Depends who you ask. One source says $8 billion a year on diversity training. Another says $4.3 billion. For that amount of money, you might assume we know that diversity training works. But we don’t.

As a 2021 paper observed, “enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals.” As an Anthropology Now article put it:

There is ample evidence that training alone does not change attitudes or behavior, or not by much and not for long. In their review of 985 studies of antibias interventions, Paluck and Green found little evidence that training reduces bias. In their review of 31 organizational studies using pretest/posttest assessments or a control group, Kulik and Roberson identified 27 that documented improved knowledge of, or attitudes toward, diversity, but most found small, short-term improvements on one or two of the items measured. In their review of 39 similar studies, Bezrukova, Joshi and Jehn identified only five that examined long-term effects on bias, two showing positive effects, two negative, and one no effect.

And as Harvard’s Roland Fryer has observed, “[t]he average impact of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training is zero and some evidence suggests that the impact can become negative if the training is mandated.” Perhaps students are more compliant than corporate workers, but so far we have not seen the datasets of “thousands and millions” (or even the anecdotes) to suggest that. 

So DEI bureaucracies have a pattern of engaging in ideological persecution in a way that restrains academic freedom; make students more afraid to talk; are used as tools to reduce intellectual diversity in higher education; engage in training programs that have little to no effect, as far as we can tell; and are pretty expensive, even in terms of higher education costs. Oh, one more thing: Because DEI includes the concepts of intersectionality and anti-Racism, they contribute to the polarization Jon Haidt and I talked about in Chapter Three of “Coddling.”

Far from mere “anecdotes” and “misinformation,” the case against DEI bureaucracy (which, as Greg has mentioned before, is only part of the larger problem of administrative bloat on campus) is very strong. During the PBS NewsHour segment, Dr. Harper mentioned that as “a past president of the American Educational Research Association” he “value[s] research and evidence.” Well, we’ve provided plenty of both here — and it only scratches the surface. And as Greg said during the segment, “the research indicating the strength of DEI programming is actually very weak.”

If Dr. Harper has something to show us, we’re happy to see it.

BIG THANKS: To the ENTIRE FIRE research department for this great last minute research, and especially to Nate Honyecutt, Andrea Lan, and our new VP of Research Angela Erickson. A great way to say thank you to them is to sign up for a paid subscription! All of the proceeds go to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

A BIG SHOT FOR THE ROAD

‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ documentary will be available to stream on Substack tomorrow!!