Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs in higher education are under attack around the country. Conservatives see these programs as purveyors of “wokeism” that limit free speech and teach discrimination, hate and divisiveness.
I’ve spent my 37-year-career in higher education in DEI work, even before we called it DEI. I started my teaching career in a religion department in a Baptist college where I integrated feminist and critical race perspectives in my biblical studies and Christian education classes. I paid a steep price for that in a place that did not want a young feminist teaching religion. I eventually switched disciplines and ended up teaching in women, gender and sexuality studies at a public university for the past 28 years.
Susan Shaw
For six years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I served as the director of our university’s Difference, Power and Discrimination program, a faculty development program that taught professors how to transform their teaching around issues of social difference, structural power, oppression, resistance and liberation. The university requires all undergraduates to take a DPD course and, in our new revision of our general education requirement, we’ve added a second course in what we’ve renamed as Difference, Power and Oppression.
Since 2014, I have served as a principal investigator or co-principal investigator on two National Science Foundation grants that seek to transform university culture and structures to create more inclusive, equitable and just institutions, particularly for women in science, technology, engineering and math. A key component of our program was a two-week seminar on applying systems of oppression theories for top university administrators and STEM deans and senior faculty.
With all the recent attacks on DEI and legislation in states like Utah, Florida and Texas that outlaws DEI in higher education, we need better to understand what DEI really is and the benefits it actually provides.
As the New York Times documented in Sunday’s issue, the attacks on DEI are a long-planned, well-funded, cynical effort to reverse the progress made in American universities toward addressing fundamental issues of gender, racial, sexual and class mistreatment, exclusion, discrimination and oppression.
The truth, however, is that DEI provides a number of benefits for all students and employees and is a much-needed facet of university life. In fact, most people who are exposed to DEI think it is important and needed. Its detractors point to excesses (and there are those, but when don’t we see excesses to any idea?) to argue DEI is actually the perpetrator of exclusion and discrimination. But in reality, DEI has prodded many universities to become more welcoming, affirming and supportive institutions for minoritized students and employees, and this benefits all people connected with the university, including its white male students.
What is DEI?
DEI programs grew out of civil and human rights movements as students and faculty within universities worked to bring ideas and practices of feminism, racial justice, sexual liberation and class politics to bear on the curriculum, university structures and campus life in order to create more diverse, inclusive and equitable institutions in places that had long served as barriers to opportunity for minoritized people. Areas of academic study such as women and gender studies, ethnic studies, and LGBTQ studies were integrated into the curriculum, and centers for women, racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people became part of the co-curriculum.
Universities added offices to address DEI issues and often hired chief diversity officers to ensure the work of equity and inclusion continued. Many schools, like mine, added commitment to diversity to its list of job requirements as a way to reflect institutional values and continue to build a university that creates space for diverse people.
“DEI was, and continues to be, needed because historically universities have not been places where minoritized people have been welcome or supported.”
DEI was, and continues to be, needed because historically universities have not been places where minoritized people have been welcome or supported. The institutions themselves were built predominantly by wealthy white men for other white men, and this was reflected in everything from the curriculum to bathrooms in the science buildings to athletics.
Even as women have become a slightly larger majority of college students, research shows they still face barriers of gender, from assumptions about their inability to do math to the threat of sexual assault or harassment. Even after more than 50 years of Title IX, very few institutions’ athletics programs are in compliance with Title IX, and national spending on men’s sports in Division I schools is double that of spending on women. Students of color and LGBTQ students and faculty also continue to face struggles for inclusion and equitable treatment.
DEI programs address not only the obvious forms of discrimination but also the subtle and structural problems that perpetuate exclusion and mistreatment. Because the university is not yet a place where minoritized people experience inclusion and equity, we still need DEI to work toward those ends.
What DEI isn’t
Counter to right-wing rhetoric, DEI is not “wokeism” or discrimination against white men. It’s not indoctrinating or censorious.
DEI is actually for all students and employees. It’s about creating an institution that welcomes and supports everybody. Its work is toward fair and equitable treatment of everyone and, at its best, its results bring about robust dialogue, learning and life skills for an increasingly diverse society.
“DEI isn’t about making white students uncomfortable for being white.”
DEI isn’t about making white students uncomfortable for being white. In reality, good education should make all students uncomfortable at some point. The point of education isn’t simply to reinforce what people already think, but rather it is to challenge people to think critically and to innovate. That’s uncomfortable, and that’s where the best learning happens. Of course, students shouldn’t be made to feel uncomfortable about their identities, but historically it’s been diverse students who have experienced that because institutions had not created welcoming spaces for them. One of the goals of DEI has been to address exactly this.
DEI should not be defined by its excesses. Certainly, we have had instances when overzealous attempts to foster inclusion have suppressed speech or when well-meaning people have mistreated others in the name of DEI. That’s what we see in the news. What we don’t see is the thousands of DEI staff members, faculty, staff and students who work hard daily to make the university and society a better place.
Why DEI is under attack
DEI is under attack by the right not because it’s some form of reverse discrimination, but because it makes for good political theater. The rhetoric that positions DEI as making white students uncomfortable or promoting reverse racism or targeting all men as rapists or endangering women by supporting trans women wins political points in a politically divided nation.
“DEI is under attack … because it makes for good political theater.”
DEI is also under attack because powerful white men fear losing their power in a world where women, people of color, LGBTQ people and poor and middle class people become aware of their rights, understand how power in institutions works against them, and demand change. The backlash against DEI is the same backlash faced by the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, the LGBTQ movement and other social movements toward justice.
Benefits of DEI
In reality, research shows DEI efforts offer multiple benefits to all university constituents. Here are 10 of those benefits.
- DEI improves the university experience for all students, including white men. All students develop better skills relating to people different from themselves, and they show better academic performance when DEI efforts are on campus and in the curriculum. Students have a greater sense of belonging and graduate at higher rates. Students also are less likely to be biased when their campuses emphasize DEI work.
- DEI improves university research efforts in ways that benefit all of society. When researchers are more diverse, they ask different questions and explore different avenues of knowledge that lead to breakthroughs and innovations that benefit all of us. In short, DEI leads to better science and better scholarship.
- DEI improves recruitment and retention of diverse students, staff and faculty. DEI programs help address issues that may prevent minoritized applicants, and they create efforts that can help keep minoritized students and employees by fostering a more inclusive climate. DEI programs tell diverse people that the university, at least, recognizes their presence and their different needs, and it gives diverse people places to feel at home, receive support and welcome different people to learn about them and their cultures, needs and contributions.
- DEI teaches people to talk and work across differences. In our increasingly diverse society, this is a key skill, and one employers seek. At its best, DEI invites all participants to engage with one another honestly and openly with a willingness to listen, challenge and change. Research shows diverse teams in the workplace are more productive, more innovative and more effective.
- DEI creates empathy, and, God knows, we could use more of that right now. As people learn about people who differ from themselves, they develop greater empathy for them. Especially as people encounter diverse others, develop relationships with them, learn with them, play with them, disagree with them and talk with them, they increase their capacity to see the world from other perspectives and to feel with others in the challenges they face.
- DEI gives visibility to minoritized students, faculty and staff. Without DEI efforts, curriculum, policies and practices default to the invisible norms of the white men for whom higher education was originally structured. DEI helps campus community members see and recognize others who are different from themselves. One simple example is helping people see things like how the assumption that all people have two parents — a mother and a father — excludes people who may have a single parent or same-sex parents or no parents. Or DEI efforts highlight the contributions of Black poets or Latina engineers or disabled scientists or remind us the land our school sits on was once the home of indigenous people from whom it was taken.
- DEI improves classroom experiences for all students as faculty learn to integrate DEI into their teaching. Most faculty members are experts in their disciplines but have little to no education in DEI. They can unintentionally make mistakes that create challenging learning environments, especially for minoritized students. For example, they may assume the gender of a student and use the wrong pronouns and words for that student, or they may teach in a way that advantages one learning style. DEI helps faculty develop classes that are effective for all students.
- DEI makes learning exciting. My students tell me they appreciate the opportunity to explore issues that matter, to talk about current events and to learn different ways to think about the world. My students are enthusiastic about learning about people who are different from themselves. Their impulse is to make the world a better place for everyone. Sure, I know they self-select into WGSS, but I teach a lot of students in general education classes who take my class because it meets a requirement, or it’s at a convenient time. They, too, usually end up getting excited, sometimes arguing, often finding places of commonality across differences. DEI learning is as fun as it is challenging, and students leave these classes with new knowledge and new lenses through which to see the world.
- DEI works to change institutional structures that marginalize, exclude and disadvantage. At my institution, we’ve worked to create better policies for hiring, promotion and tenure, and advancement into leadership by educating administrators and senior professors in DEI. As a result, for example, we’ve hired more female faculty members in engineering. That’s good for all engineering students, for engineering colleagues and for research in engineering — and that’s good for society.
- DEI challenges all of us to work for a better world. At the core of DEI values is a belief in the inherent worth of all people, the priority of inclusion and equity and the responsibility for creating a better world, starting with the university itself. The university, as a concept, particularly land grant institutions like my own, has long been about the common good. DEI is essential to move us toward that goal, and that goal is a concern of DEI.
Still work to be done
At my university, we actually talk about inclusion, equity and justice. Social justice is not “wokeism” either. It’s a goal of a world that ensures all people have what they need, that institutional structures aren’t stacked against certain groups of people, that the world is at peace, and that we all have access to opportunities to fulfill our hopes and dreams.
“Social justice is not ‘wokeism’”
I understand it’s hard for people who’ve never been on the outside of institutions built for them to understand how it feels to be an outsider. And I can see why it’s threatening for those who always have been able to assume economic, political, social and religious power to face demands for inclusion and equity. After all, they usually see these resources as finite, and to divide them equitably would mean less for them.
Feminists, however, think of power as an infinite resource when we imagine it as power-to and power-with, rather than power-over. In these images, we gain power when we share, and we progress together, not at the expense of others.
Certainly, we’ve made progress on these fronts in higher education, but there’s still lots of work to be done.
DEI makes universities better for everyone, and the implications for society are profound and important as universities create leaders, innovators and change-makers. Whether or not people are involved in universities, they should be vocal in their support of DEI, because, in the end, DEI benefits us all.
Susan M. Shaw is professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore. She also is an ordained Baptist minister and holds master’s and doctoral degrees from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Her most recent book is Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide, co-authored with Grace Ji-Sun Kim.