Thinking about DEI
Spring 2025 Blog Entry
Thinking about something isn’t the same thing as reacting to it. Reactions happen fast based on mental shortcuts. Thinking is slower, taking in information, looking at it from different angles. Thinking gives nuance and clarity; reaction may at times be necessary, but can lead in exactly the opposite direction. Unfortunately, reaction, not thinking, is the norm in a world driven by algorithms and information overload. When I say DEI, right now some will react with mistrust or hostility. Others will react to any questioning of DEI as the product of one or more ugly “isms.” That’s a big problem, of course, because reacting can feel like thinking and even lead people to replace the second with the first. I’ve done it too. I have some thoughts on DEI as an educator and an American that have surfaced over the past few months. As someone who tries to see the pros and cons, here’s what I found in my thinking process.
Diversity:
Diversity is just the opposite of sameness. A world and economy driven by interaction and communication is just going to be a world in which the diversity of human beings is ever harder to ignore. As a sociologist I study and teach about human diversity. That includes the diversity of human cultures and motivations and groups. That includes the good, bad, and ugly. There are reasons why people do what they do, and I am invested in figuring out what those reasons are, even and especially when what other people are doing is confusing or terrifying. Learning this stuff makes it easier to get around in a more connected and interactive world.
There are different kinds of diversity. Gender diversity, for example, just means not every person or culture is going to “do” masculinity and femininity in the same ways; gender isn’t binary, but a bunch of average differences with overlap. Gender isn’t sex. Sex is something we’re assigned at birth based on our anatomy. When we’re born our anatomy usually, but not always, is obviously “male” or “female.” As we grow up, we may learn that there are aspects of our bodies, in terms of hormones or chromosomes or other things, that aren’t strictly male and female. Sex, like gender, is a series of average differences; but sex is something we’re imperfectly assigned based on biology, and gender is something we learn how to do in a particular social context.
These are facts, not opinions. The biggest problem in a society that values reacting over thinking, or that increasingly can’t tell the difference between the two activities, is that we start to forget that facts and opinions aren’t the same things either. If what I said sounds partisan or political, it’s because someone with a political agenda convinced you to react that way. I am simply offering an accurate description of how the world is. I didn’t make the study of gender political and I’m not going to stop studying or teaching human diversity just because some people might not like it. Teachers and scientists don’t decide what’s partisan. Politicians and propagandists do that. I am interested in what’s true. I will change my mind based on credible new information. But there aren’t different sets of facts based on whether you’re conservative or liberal.
It’s also true that studying diversity and teaching about it doesn’t mean I control what people do with that information. Teachers, including professors, have far less power to shape the lives of young people than families, religion, and peer groups do; especially in my case, where I teach adults, some of whom are older than me, who already have a lot of ideas about the world when they show up to class. I am a liberal. I work hard to respect diverse points of view, knowing everyone is at least a little wrong about a lot of stuff, including me, and I have been rewarded with positive feedback from students (notably students who are not liberal) for it. Because I do believe as a teacher that I should strive to be nonpartisan, and willing to listen; and that if I’m going to advocate for or against something politically, I should do that outside the classroom.
Yes, teachers tend to be politically liberal. There are a lot of reasons for this. But most teachers feel the way I do, and that means their political views really aren’t that important to their work and how they interact with students. If my house caught on fire, I would never accuse a firefighter of “conservative indoctrination” when they showed up to put it out, even though firefighters as a profession lean conservative, just as teachers as a profession lean liberal, because our politics aren’t that relevant to most of our jobs most of the time. If that analogy sounds absurd, that’s because it is, in fact, absurd.
Equity:
Diversity isn’t like equity though, and equity isn’t equality. Equality means treating everyone the same. In the United States, everyone can in theory be treated the same under the law, has a chance to succeed or fail; no one is born better than anyone else, everyone’s vote counts the same, and everyone can be held accountable if they break the law. We don’t all have the same resources or abilities, but we can freely pursue opportunities to flourish. Equity means recognizing that even in a society that gives people a lot of opportunities to be treated as equals like this one, there are limitations to what equality can do. If I can vote in an election, but am wheelchair bound and can’t get up the stairs to the polling location, then I am being treated equally (I have the formal right to vote) but inequitably (I can’t exercise that right).
Unlike diversity, which isn’t necessarily political, equity is a political project, an ongoing series of decisions around how to meet people where they are, how to weigh considerations about whether some people are able to as fully exercise their rights as others. In some cases, it’s a matter of justice. Even though that’s a word that’s even harder to define, I think most Americans would agree in my example that it’s not just inequity but injustice if a person with a disability is physically prevented by stairs from voting in an election. But what if the person’s polling location is a hundred miles from their house, and they don’t have a car? Or the polling location is just really crowded and they work long hours? Those are inequitable too, but what accommodations are reasonable? Equity will always, I think, be a case where reasonable people may not agree about what accommodations are reasonable to make sure everyone can fully participate in a world of limited resources and difficult budget choices.
As a teacher, equity is important to what I do, because if students don’t have what they need to be successful in my class, it makes my job a lot harder. If students show up to class on an empty stomach because they (or their parents) can’t afford food, they’re going to have a lot harder time learning. If my students are neurodivergent (ADHD, which some are; or on the autism spectrum, as I am) then they might have a harder time interacting or focusing, and if there are reasonable things that can be done to help them do so, they can flourish. Do I wish our society made sure kids didn’t go hungry and people with different abilities were equipped to flourish from an earlier age and in a more comprehensive way? Do I think it would be more effective and cost less money to handle food insecurity and health care (both physical and mental) in a more comprehensive way, as public goods not private entitlements, outside of the schools? Of course I do. I have to advocate for equity to do my job a lot of times because the society I live in has fallen short of providing my students with what they need to flourish. Schools end up doing it because everyone else either can’t or won’t. I don’t want to “get all political” either, but as a teacher I have to make sure my students can learn.
Inclusion:
Inclusion is the part where these two things come together, the idea of making a space welcome for diverse peoples is connected to the fact that reasonable accommodations of one kind or another are needed for people to actually access that space. Making something more inclusive means assessing and lowering the barriers to entry for folks so they can thrive in a space. I was the first in my immediate family get a college degree, and now I have a PhD. I faced hurdles to thriving in college because I had to work full-time and take out loans that took 20 years to pay back to support myself; something college students whose parents can foot the bill do not experience. It was a lot of late nights and early mornings and I didn’t reach the finish line with a perfect GPA. College was inclusive enough for me to get through it, even fall in love with it; but if I had had a major accident, for example, and was confronted with a physical disability, it would have been impossible to fast-walk across campuses and through food-service spaces and work sixty or more hours many weeks between both; and I wouldn’t have made it without additional resources.
What DEI Isn’t:
So that’s what the letters mean by my reckoning, though there might be disagreement in terms of nuance. It seems DEI gets mixed up with other things that are different, like affirmative action, a set of policies designed to encourage diversity in hiring. These policies aren’t applied the same way everywhere, and I’m not a lawyer. As a faculty member working for a public school in a pro-union, “blue” state, when I am on a hiring committee, I am tasked with ensuring insofar as is possible that there is a diverse pool of qualified applicants. That mostly means having enough time to get a lot of applicants in the first place. Then it means considering whether I, whether we, have avoided the inborn human tendency to “prefer others like ourselves” rather than the best applicant for the job when selecting finalists. I have never known of any affirmative action-based hiring committee that automatically voted to hire a person solely because of their race or gender, nor have I ever seen anyone bring less qualified applicants into the ranks of the finalists just because they’re not white guys like me. I support affirmative action precisely because I think the most qualified person should get the job, period, and that the final decision shouldn’t be based on race or gender or something else. There is no contradiction there, so long as less qualified applicants aren’t being hired based on things like race or gender (like if an incompetent white guy got a job over a qualified woman of color... but I digress).
DEI at the institutional level is designed to help people feel validated and welcome and safe in a particular space. Does DEI mean creating “safe spaces”? What does it mean to be safe? What does it mean to feel safe? Those aren’t the same thing. The first one is much easier to reasonably do than the second. When I establish that I want my classes and my office hours to be safe spaces, I mean I don’t want my students to be in actual danger just by showing up and being themselves. Obviously. What I don’t mean is that they will never hear something provocative or concerning, that makes them uncomfortable, that challenges the ideas they had coming into the class. What I also don’t mean is that my students should censor themselves in discussion, even if they have something controversial to say, so long as it doesn’t devolve into threatening other students. A college education should teach a person to deal with difficult topics and inconvenient facts. I teach tough subjects; and I work to do it clearly and carefully and respectfully, but I won’t censor myself. I want to be a part of an institution that helps people become their best selves, and some of that means facing provocative and dangerous ideas with care and consideration, trying to get a deep understanding of why people do what they do.
Criticisms:
On the critical side, I do share the concerns of my conservative neighbors about expense—do some “DEI” programs or bureaucracies cost a lot of money relative to what they produce in terms of measurable value? I support taking a good long look, so long as the looking is being done in good faith with clear goals; and not as a way to attack academic freedom, starve public schooling of funds, or sling mud at my profession. Because I take pride in my work, and because scholar is a core aspect of who I am, I take it personally if you attack what I do in bad faith, regardless of who you are or why. If you asked me at age 7 what I wanted to be I would have told you I wanted to be a scientist. I got here the long way round, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And I know there are ways to make things better for a future generation of teachers and scholars, and some of those ways live in this simple three-letter acronym.
The photo is from the Paul Bunyan Trail, one of my favorite local places for long walks and bike rides in the summer. It was a three-hour walk, sometimes in snow up to my knees, with temperatures hovering near zero Fahrenheit. Refreshing but strenuous. I share it in part as a gesture of gratitude to my fellow public-sector employees, both state and federal, in these truly harrowing times.
