It has redoubled its efforts, testing the future of an embattled ideal
October 18, 2024 12:38 PM Subscribe
On the University of Michigan's DEI initiative. Nicholas Confessore (previously) reports on UM's diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy.
(Gift link; X/Twitter thread introduction)
A critical response by Dr. Tabbye Chavous, Vice Provost for Equity & Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer. R/Professors discussion.
In discussing his article, Confessore recommends two recent articles on state universities.
A critical response by Dr. Tabbye Chavous, Vice Provost for Equity & Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer. R/Professors discussion.
In discussing his article, Confessore recommends two recent articles on state universities.
I think that link was meant to go here - although, I have to say, that response only makes the article look stronger.
posted by kickingtheground at 12:54 PM on October 18 [2 favorites]
posted by kickingtheground at 12:54 PM on October 18 [2 favorites]
The Chronicle of Higher Education -- which is the .edu news source -- has been running articles about the assault on DEI for a few years now. They even have a tracker for anti-DEI legislation: state-by-state list (though I don't believe that non-subscribers can view any of it...so, uh, take my word for it that it's a lot), as well as a tag search across the site.
The ferocity of the attacks by the GOP is startling in their persistence and aggression. It seems like many of the politicians working against DEI take it very, very personally. I suppose that those in favor of DEI see it as a necessary push-back to centuries of imbalance, while those opposing DEI see it as..some sort of existential threat? I wish there was a way to discuss things without going straight to MAXIMUM EFFORT MUST WIN AT ALL COSTS.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:16 PM on October 18 [3 favorites]
The ferocity of the attacks by the GOP is startling in their persistence and aggression. It seems like many of the politicians working against DEI take it very, very personally. I suppose that those in favor of DEI see it as a necessary push-back to centuries of imbalance, while those opposing DEI see it as..some sort of existential threat? I wish there was a way to discuss things without going straight to MAXIMUM EFFORT MUST WIN AT ALL COSTS.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:16 PM on October 18 [3 favorites]
Ya this article is boring. Not really making any new points that haven't been expressed breathlessly over and over again by the media about college campuses. This sort of article is just the liberal NYT version of Republican attacks against any form of racial progress.
posted by grimace636 at 1:19 PM on October 18
posted by grimace636 at 1:19 PM on October 18
My bad - yes, the words "critical response" should have had this link attached.
posted by doctornemo at 1:19 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by doctornemo at 1:19 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
The Chronicle of Higher Education -- which is the .edu news source
The Chronicle is essential, yes, and does fine work. But it's important to remember their competitor, Inside Higher Ed, which also is a great higher ed news source.
posted by doctornemo at 1:21 PM on October 18 [3 favorites]
The Chronicle is essential, yes, and does fine work. But it's important to remember their competitor, Inside Higher Ed, which also is a great higher ed news source.
posted by doctornemo at 1:21 PM on October 18 [3 favorites]
What's most interesting about this article is that it makes no attempt to give off any insight on whether the author believes that the goals of DEI are worth pursuing.
There is a lot of room for critiquing and struggling with how DEI is employed from a lens of still helping achieve its goals and building on top of the ideas of anti-racism. But instead, this article takes the NYT "both-sides" route of letting the idea just sorta hang out there, "hey, maybe this has gone "too far". maybe this is bad".
Reminds me of the NYT trans coverage.
posted by grimace636 at 1:29 PM on October 18 [3 favorites]
There is a lot of room for critiquing and struggling with how DEI is employed from a lens of still helping achieve its goals and building on top of the ideas of anti-racism. But instead, this article takes the NYT "both-sides" route of letting the idea just sorta hang out there, "hey, maybe this has gone "too far". maybe this is bad".
Reminds me of the NYT trans coverage.
posted by grimace636 at 1:29 PM on October 18 [3 favorites]
I'm part of the higher ed DEI Industrial complex and was foolishly hoping for a meaningful critique of our work.
Yes, you can find more than a handful of grumpy people about DEI work throughout the institution. Some of them even have impressive sounding titles. No, we have erased centuries of white supremacy and patriarchy in a decade with a couple dozen staff members, a budget dwarfed by how much we spend on toilet paper, and lawmakers giving us the evil eye every ten minutes.
Here's the thing, our students and our faculty and staff are mostly still new to the ideas that we should think and interact with the world with an attitude that doesn't only have room for our cultural biases. There will be clumsy attempts at doing good as long as I live, and probably much longer.
As someone doing the work, I want to examine what indigenous cultures called these plants and used them for _AND_ have buses that bring people from the city to gardens.
There is a huge backlash against DEI work in higher education. Some of it comes from the American right, but a lot of it also coming from boring white centrists tired of being asked to grow.
posted by advicepig at 1:44 PM on October 18 [9 favorites]
Yes, you can find more than a handful of grumpy people about DEI work throughout the institution. Some of them even have impressive sounding titles. No, we have erased centuries of white supremacy and patriarchy in a decade with a couple dozen staff members, a budget dwarfed by how much we spend on toilet paper, and lawmakers giving us the evil eye every ten minutes.
Here's the thing, our students and our faculty and staff are mostly still new to the ideas that we should think and interact with the world with an attitude that doesn't only have room for our cultural biases. There will be clumsy attempts at doing good as long as I live, and probably much longer.
As someone doing the work, I want to examine what indigenous cultures called these plants and used them for _AND_ have buses that bring people from the city to gardens.
There is a huge backlash against DEI work in higher education. Some of it comes from the American right, but a lot of it also coming from boring white centrists tired of being asked to grow.
posted by advicepig at 1:44 PM on October 18 [9 favorites]
When it comes to diversity and inclusion, I really wish there was more discussion about TRANSPORTATION:
Sometime "access" can be really literal.
I don't know the numbers, but I would not be surprised if car-access is also highly correlated with other marginalization, including racial and economic marginalization.
posted by jb at 2:01 PM on October 18 [6 favorites]
D.E.I. theory and debates over nomenclature sometimes obscured real-world barriers to inclusion. The strategic plan for Michigan’s renowned arboretum and botanical gardens calls for employees to rethink the use of Latin and English plant names, which “actively erased” other “ways of knowing,” and adopt “a ‘polycentric’ paradigm, decentering singular ways of knowing and cocreating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horticultural modalities, Two-Eyed Seeing, Kinomaage and other cocreated power realignments.”So many people simply don't have access to places where you have to drive - many of whom don't/can't drive due to poverty and/or disability/health, or just because they never had the opportunity to learn.
Only one sentence in the 37-page plan is devoted to the biggest impediment to making the gardens accessible to a more diverse array of visitors: It is hard to get there without a car. (While the arboretum is adjacent to campus, the gardens are some miles away.) “The No. 1 issue across the board was always transportation,” said Bob Grese, who led the arboretum and gardens until 2020. “We were never able to get funding for that.”
Sometime "access" can be really literal.
I don't know the numbers, but I would not be surprised if car-access is also highly correlated with other marginalization, including racial and economic marginalization.
posted by jb at 2:01 PM on October 18 [6 favorites]
Tressie McMillan Cottom did an extended (for Instagram, anyway) video sparked by this piece yesterday. I found her observations on the tricky place DEI offices occupy in higher ed institutions very interesting.
posted by EvaDestruction at 2:15 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by EvaDestruction at 2:15 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
I'm part of the higher ed DEI Industrial complex and was foolishly hoping for a meaningful critique of our work.
I don't have a meaningful critique, but a small, poorly thought out one: DEI efforts on campuses which are already exclusive are like arranging the deck chairs in first class the Titanic to be more "fair". By their very nature, elite universities will always be exclusive - and they are also only a drop in the bucket of our society.
So many of our equity issues are so much larger: they are in wage structures, urban planning, law enforcement, k-12 education, immigration policies, even just basic health care access. When I think of meaningfully changing education and occupational outcomes for Black students in the US, for example, I don't think it's going to happen at elite universities, but in community colleges and state universities - and only when things also change in pre-, elementary and high schools, too.
DEI programs in elite universities may be influencing leaders of tomorrow - and some of the intellectual leaders of today. But I think I would prefer that more leaders didn't come up through the elite-university pipeline at all. I would like to see worker-leaders, immigrant-leaders; writers and media people who maybe didn't go to tertiary education at all.
My other offhand critique is that some DEI practice/training is just really, really bad. I've had great DEI training, and I've had not so great. It's like restaurants - just because one has rotten food doesn't mean eating out is a bad idea, but having that kind of experience can really turn people off. My local city has a rigorous inspection program for restaurants, but no one has oversight over the provision of DEI services. There's a similar issue when it comes to indigenous consultations: various people can set up their shingle and claim to speak for one community or another, but who says who is legitimate? Obviously, it would not be appropriate for settlers to decide that, but our current situation is also very hard to navigate.
------------
I also like the comment made by one of the interviewees that modern DEI is too formulaic:
I also get very annoyed when modern American racial categories are projected onto different times and places. Race is socially constructed, so that means that it changes from society to society. Studying how people are categorized in different cultural regimes is interesting and important, but you also have to keep your mind open to seeing the slices happen in different places depending on where (and when) you are standing. After all, for the early twentieth century German Nazis, Iranians were white, but Ashekenazi Jews weren't - and in contemporary North America, this has completely flipped.
posted by jb at 2:41 PM on October 18
I don't have a meaningful critique, but a small, poorly thought out one: DEI efforts on campuses which are already exclusive are like arranging the deck chairs in first class the Titanic to be more "fair". By their very nature, elite universities will always be exclusive - and they are also only a drop in the bucket of our society.
So many of our equity issues are so much larger: they are in wage structures, urban planning, law enforcement, k-12 education, immigration policies, even just basic health care access. When I think of meaningfully changing education and occupational outcomes for Black students in the US, for example, I don't think it's going to happen at elite universities, but in community colleges and state universities - and only when things also change in pre-, elementary and high schools, too.
DEI programs in elite universities may be influencing leaders of tomorrow - and some of the intellectual leaders of today. But I think I would prefer that more leaders didn't come up through the elite-university pipeline at all. I would like to see worker-leaders, immigrant-leaders; writers and media people who maybe didn't go to tertiary education at all.
My other offhand critique is that some DEI practice/training is just really, really bad. I've had great DEI training, and I've had not so great. It's like restaurants - just because one has rotten food doesn't mean eating out is a bad idea, but having that kind of experience can really turn people off. My local city has a rigorous inspection program for restaurants, but no one has oversight over the provision of DEI services. There's a similar issue when it comes to indigenous consultations: various people can set up their shingle and claim to speak for one community or another, but who says who is legitimate? Obviously, it would not be appropriate for settlers to decide that, but our current situation is also very hard to navigate.
------------
I also like the comment made by one of the interviewees that modern DEI is too formulaic:
Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I. is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity inherently means friction.”There can definitely be a certain kind of checkbox mentality. I remember being asked in my graduate program how my research addressed race or gender issues. It didn't. It was research on economic inequality between households in a time and place that was (mostly) racially homogenous. It was definitely about inclusion: it was explicitly about access to resources, but it didn't fit into modern American discourse about inclusion.
I also get very annoyed when modern American racial categories are projected onto different times and places. Race is socially constructed, so that means that it changes from society to society. Studying how people are categorized in different cultural regimes is interesting and important, but you also have to keep your mind open to seeing the slices happen in different places depending on where (and when) you are standing. After all, for the early twentieth century German Nazis, Iranians were white, but Ashekenazi Jews weren't - and in contemporary North America, this has completely flipped.
posted by jb at 2:41 PM on October 18
I think that link was meant to go here - although, I have to say, that response only makes the article look stronger.
It does. Pretty embarrassing actually. Particularly for someone, who as Vice Provost for Equity & Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, earned $402,800 last year.
Also interesting that her predecessor in the position was her husband. I'm sure the search was fair and inclusive, with a wide net cast.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:00 PM on October 18
It does. Pretty embarrassing actually. Particularly for someone, who as Vice Provost for Equity & Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, earned $402,800 last year.
Also interesting that her predecessor in the position was her husband. I'm sure the search was fair and inclusive, with a wide net cast.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:00 PM on October 18
Thanks, I thought that Tressie McMillan Cottom video was informative!
Obviously there's a lot going on here but it always feels unfortunate that American legalistic culture wants to handle everything as an "investigation" into potential wrongdoing and, simultaneously, a battle over abstract principles of academic freedom and the First Amendment. Here it seems like a lot of professors and students were dealing with changing mores around how to teach material involving racial slurs and outdated language—especially at a time where racism was heavily in the news and people were being overtly racist around campus—and unless someone's being a real jerk about it, the solution isn't a bunch of independent investigations and stern statements from FIRE, it's generally guiding faculty and students so they can teach and learn effectively today.
These things change and I don't think any of us can claim to predict in exactly which direction. It wasn't that long ago that male students swam nude in phys ed class but books that are now commonplace in classrooms, like Ulysses or Howl, were deemed obscene. We shouldn't expect norms to stay frozen in the '90s—or for them to evolve without a few hiccups.
posted by smelendez at 3:11 PM on October 18
Obviously there's a lot going on here but it always feels unfortunate that American legalistic culture wants to handle everything as an "investigation" into potential wrongdoing and, simultaneously, a battle over abstract principles of academic freedom and the First Amendment. Here it seems like a lot of professors and students were dealing with changing mores around how to teach material involving racial slurs and outdated language—especially at a time where racism was heavily in the news and people were being overtly racist around campus—and unless someone's being a real jerk about it, the solution isn't a bunch of independent investigations and stern statements from FIRE, it's generally guiding faculty and students so they can teach and learn effectively today.
These things change and I don't think any of us can claim to predict in exactly which direction. It wasn't that long ago that male students swam nude in phys ed class but books that are now commonplace in classrooms, like Ulysses or Howl, were deemed obscene. We shouldn't expect norms to stay frozen in the '90s—or for them to evolve without a few hiccups.
posted by smelendez at 3:11 PM on October 18
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posted by It is regrettable that at 12:50 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]