In an opinion piece published today, a pair of Stanford academics argue that DEI is not working on college campuses. In fact, they argue that DEI as currently constituted is likely to be doing more harm than good. To solve this problem, they offer an alternative version of DEI which does away with the oppressor-oppressed framework present in most DEI trainings today.
There’s an effort in this piece to frame the authors as staking out a reasonable middle ground. The main thrust is a disagreement with the dominant, progressive version of DEI, but they want to also signal disagreement with conservative critics of DEI.
In recent years, the goals of diversity and inclusion have become the bête noire of the political right, in part to avoid reckoning with our nation’s history of slavery and discrimination in ways that might cause, as some state laws have put it, “discomfort, guilt…
