This article originally appeared in Newsweek.
By Eric Kaufmann, June 17, 2024
Pressure from Republican politicians and conservative donors is beginning to cause Harvard, MIT, and other elite institutions to grudgingly step back from progressive illiberalism.
Consider Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Representative Michael Cloud’s (R-Tex.) new Dismantle DEI Act, which would eliminate mandatory diversity statements as well as Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) administrators and initiatives in the federal government. Critically, the measure hits National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health research funding, two of the worst DEI offenders, dramatically changing the incentive structure of American academic research.
Some conservatives cling to an optimistic conceit that a quiet majority of university faculty oppose woke policies and are suddenly acquiring the confidence to challenge radical activists, but this is not borne out by the evidence. Lawmakers like Vance and Cloud have a key role to play in the ongoing battle to restore political neutrality and expressive freedom to the nation’s institutions, schools, and wider public culture.
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently announced an end to the use of mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements require applicants for jobs, promotions, or grants to demonstrate how they will advance DEI principles as a condition of success.
This requirement discriminates against conservative and classical liberal applicants who, reflecting the views of a majority of Americans, prioritize equal treatment, objective truth, and freedom of speech above equal outcomes and emotional safety for minorities. Diversity statements are loyalty oaths which violate applicants’ freedom of conscience and discriminate on the basis of philosophical belief.
Harvard’s scrapping of diversity statements follows a similar move from MIT, the first elite blue-state institution to do so. Harvard has also vowed to remain neutral on political questions that do not concern the university’s narrow self-interest.
Why the shift?
The optimistic take is that most faculty have previously been too intimidated by a noisy minority of DEI activists to raise their heads above the parapet, but have now found their mettle and are restoring reason, debate, and merit to the classroom. Universities will reform themselves, the argument goes, unless conservative politicians intervene, because doing so would politicize DEI, turning it into a front in the culture war that causes academics to close ranks and derail internal reform.
This account does not fit the facts. Extensive survey data reveal, as I argue in my book The Third Awokening, that the rise of cancel culture and DEI stems primarily from “bleeding heart” left-liberals, not the revolutionary far Left.
Left-liberals, motivated by guilt, empathy, and an alarmist fear of the majority, created taboos around race, gender, and sexuality, inflating the definition of harassment and discrimination. They presided over an expanding DEI infrastructure of affirmative action, speech codes, and diversity training.
While the far Left leveraged liberals’ apparatus of taboos, codes and policies as a force multiplier, it did not create that apparatus. Though radical innovations such as critical race and gender theory now furnish the vocabulary for diversity training and teaching materials, these—like “defund the police”—only gained traction because they resonated with the underlying “majority bad, minorities good” reflex of the liberals who form a majority in many elite institutions.
Notwithstanding anecdotal evidence, mandatory diversity statements are popular with academics. Surveys in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia show that, in all four countries, social science faculty at elite institutions support these statements by a margin of almost two to one.
American academics are also 50 percent more likely to support than oppose the “decolonization” of the curriculum through mandatory race and gender quotas for authors on reading lists. Most favor applying social pressure to colleagues who refuse to attend diversity training. Members of the general public who identify as progressive are even less supportive of academic freedom than are progressive academics.
We see echoes of this pro-DEI majority in a recent survey of Harvard faculty, which found that most faculty view donors and the political Right, not DEI and the Left, as the main threat to their freedom. That mentality was on display in the 65-29 vote by Columbia Faculty of Arts and Sciences professors to censure president Nemat Shafik for calling in the police to remove a pro-Palestinian encampment even after protesters vandalized Hamilton Hall.
Contrast that vote with the situation in 1969, when Cornell faculty voted by a two-to-one margin to censure president James Perkins for acceding to the demands of radical Left protesters. An important difference is that the Left-Right ratio among social science and humanities academics has exploded from approximately three to one in the 1960s to 13 to one today. Academics in the ’60s largely stood apart from the protesters and wanted the rules enforced. Now many encourage activism, abjure the rules and join in the protests.
Diversity statements were first banned in red states like Florida and Texas, or by state-appointed trustees, as in North Carolina. Soon afterwards, university presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT were publicly embarrassed in a congressional hearing on antisemitism following Hamas‘ October 7 attack on Israel.
It is no accident that Kornbluth became the first leader of an elite school to ban diversity statements—a move Harvard has now followed. The hearings led to the ouster of Gay and Magill, and put Kornbluth and others on notice. Donors such as Bill Ackman and Ken Griffin made their displeasure known online, hitting university balance sheets.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Most academics and administrators support DEI, but external pressure from conservative politicians and donors has forced high-profile university leaders to change course. Where external pressure is weak, as in Canada or California, progressive illiberalism dominates. Only sustained political intervention can reform universities and public institutions.
If voters want to remove woke politics from settings such as schools and government agencies, they must use elected government to drive change.
Eric Kaufmann is a Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and Professor of Politics at University of Buckingham.
