The Benefits of DEI? Not So Much

The Trump administration is, for the first time since the emergence of the full-blown DEI regime in higher education, looking closely at what that movement has produced and where it runs counter to educational and political norms. The administration is using its authority to pressure colleges and universities to move away from practices that are not in conformity with those norms.

This has led to bitter complaint from the advocates of DEI ideology. In a recent Inside Higher Ed article, writer Sara Weissman ponders the “DEI Hills Higher Education Is Willing to Die On.” Naturally, DEI advocates want people to believe that they’re battling to save a noble cause.

It is telling that AAUP president Wolfson names no specific piece of objectively useful research that the demolition of DEI would prevent. There is much handwringing in Weissman’s article concerning what is being lost. The author quotes Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, who strikes the stance of a protestor instead of a representative of a scholarly body. He says he is against any effort to curb the excesses of DEI “with every inch of my soul,” and he claims that AAUP’s membership is ready to “put our bodies on the line” to defend DEI.

When Wolfson says something a bit more substantive, he decries a purported imposition of “limits [on] research and curricula,” which could allegedly harm “the collective good.” It is telling, though, that he names no specific piece of objectively useful research that the demolition of DEI would prevent.

We are not told what evidence shows that minority-student learning is substantively and objectively improved by DEI. Another respondent in the article claims that all DEI does is “put the student first.” That is, it provides to those students recognized as members of underrepresented groups a set of reading materials written by members of their groups and otherwise creates “a learning environment for success” for such students. Still another interview subject alludes to “research” that “shows multicultural centers help students build ‘multicultural knowledge’.”

We are not told what evidence shows that minority-student learning is substantively and objectively improved by encounters with writers of their own identity categories. Nor are we apprised as to what “multicultural knowledge” is or what it has to do with the actual learning tasks students have in college courses. Such assertions, however, provide cover for DEI advocates.

Some efforts have been made to produce data useful to the defense of DEI, although they are uniformly suspect. Much of this work has been done in the business and management world, endeavoring to show that increasing diversity and otherwise adhering to DEI principles in the corporate sector increases the financial productivity and problem-solving abilities of companies.

The weakness of this research can typically be demonstrated by a few moments’ consideration of the methodologies used. A group of much-cited McKinsey studies, for example, claim to show how much diversity helps drive a firm’s financial success. But the McKinsey methodology was applied by independent researchers to U.S. S&P 500 firms, and no positive effect of diversity on the bottom line was found.

The claim that DEI improves the scholarly and pedagogical work of institutions of higher education is hard to demonstrate, for the same reasons that it is difficult to test the comparative intellectual quality of scholarly work and the amount and quality of learning enabled by given pedagogical programs.

Evaluating the intellectual quality of scholarly work requires close qualitative attention to articles and books and a carefully calibrated schema for the evaluation of such work. Doing this for an entire college’s faculty would be tremendously onerous at the level of labor hours. I do not know of a single academic department in any college or university that has ever seriously undertaken a study of this kind to see, for example, how the scholarship of its current faculty stacks up to that of the school’s faculty in the days before DEI.

Efforts to demonstrate the positive educational and scholarly results for DEI are weak. It is sometimes claimed that more diversity and more DEI-centric pedagogy make students score higher on a variable known in the literature as “CCC,” or “cross-cultural competency.” (This is likely what the IHE subject above is referring to as “multicultural knowledge.”) Translated into plain English, all this means is that students subjected to DEI methods and materials demonstrate more knowledge about DEI concepts—e.g., white supremacy, intersectionality, body positivity, gender identity, microaggressions, and the like. It’s no proof that they’ve become better students or human beings.

Some studies that claim to show the positive effects of DEI invent new conceptual categories. Some studies that claim to show the positive effects of DEI invent new conceptual categories that involve nothing more than asking students how much they think they learned and taking that as an indicator of their performance. “Science self-efficacy” is one such category. It means “self-reported confidence in the ability to do science,” which has nothing at all to do with the objective amount of scientific knowledge or ability of the reporting student.

The reasoning of DEI-friendly studies showing positive benefits is frequently so convoluted as to fall apart on close examination. The reasoning of DEI-friendly studies showing positive benefits is frequently so convoluted as to fall apart on close examination. One report from Stanford purports that diversity creates greater “complex thinking” in students. It studied perceptions by groups of white students regarding speakers introducing ideas to their groups. When the introducer was black, the groups always perceived the perspective as more “innovative,” even when the perspective introduced was the same as the view the group had already generated. What researchers called the “integrative complexity” of writing done by the student subjects increased when they were introduced to different perspectives—that is, viewpoint diversity mattered. But it did not matter if the introducer of the new perspective was white or black. In other words, the kind of diversity DEI pursues produced absolutely no improvement in student performance.

More recently, a study done in the wake of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that claims to show how DEI increases academic performance in law schools was cheeringly reported in the media. It studied citations of student-run law reviews and found that those reviews that were more diverse in the racial makeup of their authors were cited more frequently. But there is no reason to believe that citation alone is a reliable and objective reflection of the intellectual quality of an article.

Furthermore, if, as critics of DEI and similar efforts to weaken the traditional scholarly methods and fields of academia have been demonstrating for years, whole intellectual fields, including that of legal studies, have been increasingly moved away from traditional rigor and toward the superficial and frequently anti-intellectual concerns of woke-left politics, one would hardly find it odd that scholars in those fields are attending in much greater numbers to work that comports to those ideological standards.

Bearing in mind the IHE article’s promise of an impending “huge loss” to intellectual life, I reflected on the situation on my own campus, Bucknell University, and imagined what would be lost. As is true in many other schools, whole organizational units here are dedicated to the kind of purely ideological material produced by DEI values that inevitably skews the campus discourse toward the progressive left.

For example, all students in the College of Arts and Sciences are now required to take at least one course dedicated to “Race, Power, and Inequality” and another on “Nature, People, and Justice” to graduate. These courses are dedicated, respectively, to examining “the processes … by which different forms of power and privilege construct, maintain and enforce structural oppression related to race and identity” and “identify[ing] … the consequences of environmental change … [and] potential courses of action necessary to create a more just and equitable world.”

Beyond the required elements of DEI at Bucknell, plentiful evidence of its effect on campus discourse is easily visible in the advertisements for public talks and events. The Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives & Cultures is in the midst of a series on “Decolonial Education and Liberatory Learning.” The institute explains on its webpage, “A decolonial approach does not confine itself to critiques of colonial epistemes and world order; it demands employing heterarchical approaches to knowledge.” Two of the talks in this series were titled “Ending Curriculum Violence and Racial Trauma in the Classroom” and “Rethinking Community Engaged Research with Black Feminist Ecologies.”

Our Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, & Gender has recently sponsored campus talks on such topics as “Seriously, Why Am I Still Made to Feel Like a Problem: Being Muslim in American Today” and “We Are Not American: A Queer Diasporic Reading of Noor Hindi’s Poetry and Malaka Gharib’s Graphic Novel.”

We are asked to believe, without evidence, that students are performing at a higher level academically and that American society as a whole is improved because of exposure to such stuff. It takes a significant amount of self-deception to believe such claims.

Alexander Riley is a professor of sociology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars. All views expressed are his own and do not represent the views of his employer. Follow him on Substack here.