Prof. Danielle Allen (Harvard) on Diversity and Academic Freedom

An excerpt from an opinion piece that she wrote at the Washington Post Dec. 10, but that I had missed:

I was one of three co-chairs of Harvard's Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, which in 2018 delivered a strategic framework for the campus…. Across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense, but the values of lowercase-i inclusion and lowercase-d diversity remain foundational to healthy democracy….

We wrote [in our report]: "Our shared pursuits … depend on the open and direct expression of ideas and on criteria of evaluation established by the judgments of experts. Excellence therefore also requires academic freedom. Inclusion and academic freedom — these principles are linked in each being necessary to the pursuit of truth."

We grounded the work in a broad commitment to pluralism. We wanted a diversity of views on campus, and we recognized that the sources of diversity are myriad. We cared as much about viewpoint and religion as any other source of diversity…. While we acknowledged historical patterns in our report, we did not dwell on the theme of historical injustices. We did not see the challenge in front of us as "white supremacy"; we never used a vocabulary of that kind. Our faces were set to the future. We saw in the rich diversity of our campus an opportunity — a chance to achieve a higher level of excellence powered by intense engagements across a vast range of viewpoints….

[But] three themes in our report went largely overlooked by university administrators as they began to pursue implementation — our focus on academic freedom, on the need to make space for religious identity and on the need for greater political diversity on our campus. Older paradigms that focused only on some groups as marginalized, as opposed to all groups as sources of potential and perspective, came back to the fore….

I am as against racism as anyone, but I believe we can all be better together based on a positive vision. Yes, it is necessary to tackle challenges such as implicit bias. But, counter to the anti-racism agenda, we cannot create a framework for inclusion and belonging that is focused on accusation.

As was the case in our 2018 report, the conceptual center of such a framework in our campus communities should be excellence, and what each and every one of us can contribute to that, for the sake of increased benefit to society. Bringing out the best in all of us — to achieve a sum greater than the parts — is possible only if we cultivate a culture of mutual respect. Somehow the racial reckoning of 2020 lost sight of that core goal of a culture of mutual respect with human dignity at the center. A shaming culture was embraced instead….

There's a lot more in the article, and I don't entirely agree with its analysis; but this passage struck me as especially worth passing along.

Comments

[Stephen Lathrop]

There may be a need to expand the range of political identity on campuses. It is unwise to insist that affirmative action for movement conservatism is a legitimate way to address that need.

Movement conservatism has shown itself to be a phenomenon based on unfalsifiable premises, which practices opportunistic actions. It is more reactive and tribal than it is anything else.

To the extent movement conservatism champions particular political agendas, they tend to be agendas movement conservative leaders prefer not to speak aloud. They include vindication of white supremacy, anti-immigrant policies founded in racial hatred, pro-plutocratic economic policies, a generalized disdain for education and expertise, and insistence on results-oriented, hyper-rationalist politics uncritiqued by either ethics or experience. That leaves relatively little to teach.

Also, except as targets of energetic criticism, none of that merits consideration for inclusion in any academic diversity agenda. Proposals would be ill advised to hire faculty to defend such content-free subject matter. Willingness to teach it ought to be treated more as an academic disqualification than otherwise.

A constructive academic program might seek instead to increase political diversity by reintroducing would-be conservative students to Burkean concepts of conservatism—which are, of course, concepts which movement conservatives denigrate and revile. Nevertheless, Burkean conservatism provides a better tool to critique leftist excess than anything movement conservatism can offer. Indeed, movement conservatism can only be expected to goad leftists to further extremes. Indeed, in context of dystopian results from a movement conservative triumph, leftist excess might look notably better by comparison.

[Cheerio]

Leaving aside the severe overstatements and gratuitous smears, you have some valid points here.

But alas, quite analogous points could readily be made in the other direction. The blinding moral certainty of the preachings from both cultural extremes are really more alike than they are different...it's just that one of those happens to dominate in our current swing of the pendulum.

Classical liberalism rejects religious zealotry on the right as well as the quasi-religious zealotry of today's left (though the latter sometimes masquerades as science, and quite smugly at that...thus provoking, or "goading" as you put it, overcorrection in the form of some becoming too dismissive of expertise).

So...I'll see your Edmund Burke, and raise you a John Stuart Mill.

[Stephen Lathrop]

A worthy bet, and not costly for even a small institution to call.

[Bwaaah]

Well put.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Dr. Frankenstein is shocked to find her monster running amok.