New York Times, The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?:
A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever.
Leaders of the University of Michigan, one of America’s most prestigious public universities, like to say that their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is inseparable from the pursuit of academic excellence. Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.” Doctoral students in educational studies must take an “equity lab” and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions.
Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies. Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.” …
A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.
Michigan inaugurated what it now calls D.E.I. 1.0, it intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then reshaping American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I., convinced that such programs would help attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty.
Today that revolution is under withering attack. Energized by backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and the right-wing campaign against “critical race theory” in public institutions, at least a dozen states have banned or limited D.E.I. programs at public universities. After the Oct. 7 attacks, as campuses across the country erupted with protests against Israel, critics accused D.E.I. programs of fostering antisemitism. In the fever of the 2024 campaign, Republican influencers and politicians have recast D.E.I. as an all-purpose boogeyman — the root cause of defective airplanes, the collapse of a Baltimore bridge and the near-assassination of Donald J. Trump.
But even some of Michigan’s peer institutions have soured on aspects of D.E.I. Last spring, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences said they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity; such “compelled statements,” M.I.T.’s president said, “impinge on freedom of expression.”
Michigan hasn’t joined the retreat. Instead, it has redoubled its efforts, testing the future of an embattled ideal. A year ago, the university inaugurated what it calls D.E.I. 2.0. At Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241, according to figures compiled by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university’s Flint campus and a D.E.I. critic. (The school’s own figures, which count the D.E.I. work force differently, show less growth over time and a much smaller staff as of last year.) When school began in August, brightly colored flags around campus promoted the goals of D.E.I. 2.0.
According to a confidential report I obtained, a committee appointed by Michigan’s provost — and stocked with professors with D.E.I.-related appointments — urged the school this summer to continue using diversity statements in hiring and promotion, arguing that eliminating them “would be seen as a capitulation to the winds of political expediency.”
In many respects, Michigan’s entire D.E.I. initiative can be understood as a sustained act of defiance against such pressures. Nearly two decades ago, voters in Michigan banned racial preferences in university admissions and hiring. When the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action across the land last year — stripping selective colleges of their most powerful tool for building racially diverse classes — Michigan’s president, Santa J. Ono, went on PBS’s “NewsHour” to offer his university as the model for achieving diversity in a post-affirmative action world.
But over months of reporting this year, I found a different kind of backlash building, one that emanated not from Washington or right-wing think tanks but from inside the university’s own dorms and faculty lounges. On Michigan’s largely left-leaning campus, few of the people I met questioned the broad ideals of diversity or social justice. Yet the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.
D.E.I. at Michigan is rooted in a struggle for racial integration that began more than a half-century ago, but many Black students today regard the school’s expansive program as a well-meaning failure. The university now has a greater proportion of Hispanic, Asian and first-generation students and a more racially diverse staff. But in a state where 14 percent of residents are Black, the school’s Black undergraduate enrollment has long hovered stubbornly at around 4 percent, before ticking up just past 5 percent this fall. (The figures are slightly higher if, as school officials strongly urged, you include students who identify as more than one race.) …
Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.
Instead, Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself. “D.E.I. here is absolutely well intentioned, extremely thoughtful in its conception and design,” said Mark Bernstein, a lawyer and a Democrat who sits on the university’s Board of Regents. “But it’s so virtuous that it’s escaped accountability in a lot of ways.” …
By the spring of 2020, Michigan was reaching the final stage of its first 5-year D.E.I. plan. But in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis police officer that May, as protests erupted around the country and demands to root out racism echoed from campuses to corporate offices, none of the training and programming — the money and new hires and promises — seemed to matter. Scrambling to placate the most vocal students and faculty, Michigan would unveil a burst of new initiatives branded as “antiracist.”
But the anger had been building for years, from Ferguson to #MeToo, charged with the paranoia and isolation of Covid, nurtured and legitimized by Michigan itself. Now it turned inward. Every part of the university seemed to stage its own auto-da-fé, each playing out on Twitter and in The Daily. “There was a complete disconnect between the source of their anger and the target of it,” the former dean said. “It was insatiable.”
At the law school, which had a longstanding policy of not commenting on events “outside the Quad,” students demanded a public statement about Floyd’s murder. The Black Law Students Association issued further demands, including mandatory antiracism training, more mental health counseling and the hiring of a professor in critical race theory. Over 100 incoming first-year students signed a joint statement to the school they did not yet technically attend, insisting that it adopt the entirety of the association’s demands.
The law school’s dean, Mark West, released a note about “the senseless killing of yet another Black person, George Floyd” and “redoubling our clear commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.” Students blasted him on Twitter for not using the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” Few of the attacks appeared to come from Black students. “I will never know what it is like to be a Black student at MLaw,” one white student emailed West. “But even still, your message instantly came off to me as shallow, corporate, platitudinous drivel.” West, who is white, soon issued a revised statement. “We support you. We see you. We hear you,” it read. “Black Lives Matter.” (West, who still teaches at Michigan, declined to comment.)
With the school in turmoil, West hired a pair of D.E.I. consultants, Jerry Kang and Devon Carbado, who taught law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and had served as senior D.E.I. administrators there. In meetings, Kang and Carbado invited students and faculty to share their experiences of racism and discrimination at the university. Yet for all the heated public rhetoric, people with knowledge of the discussions told me, some of the examples seemed to them relatively minor. Some cited a professor who, some years earlier, had two students with the last name Xu — it sounds like “shoe” — who sat next to each other in class; he had once referred to them as “left Xu” and “right Xu.” In another class, a professor had asked a white student to read aloud from the landmark Supreme Court decision Cooper v. Aaron, which forced the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock, Ark. The 1958 decision contained the term “Negro,” which some students said was offensive.
More training followed. In early 2021, the entire law faculty was invited to a session provided through Michigan’s Spectrum Center, which serves the school’s L.G.B.T.Q. community. Many professors joined the Zoom, desperate for help navigating classroom moments that had become dangerously charged. Instead, the session was devoted to gender terminology, pronoun usage and sexual identity. The facilitator urged them to require students to declare their preferred pronouns and furnished a list of dozens of sexual orientations, some of which professors told me they had never heard of. Instead of asking students about their sexuality, they were advised, faculty should ask students to specify their “attractionality.” Some wondered why they should be asking students about their sex lives at all.
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