Many people hate DEI (no news there). Many of those same people also are emphatic that universities must do more to prioritize intellectual and political diversity on campus. And in the overlapping diagram, it is taken for granted that the DEI apparatus is apathetic if not antagonistic to the project of promoting political diversity. It's not even something argued for; it is a presupposition that forms part of the foundation explaining why DEI is unjust.
And yet, in my experience, the academic site where one is most likely to see discussion about and concern over political diversity is ... in the DEI space.
We had our first faculty meeting of the year yesterday, which included the various faculty committees getting our formal charges. I'm chairing the law school's DEI committee (we're still allowed to have one, I guess). One thing last year's committee did was commission a "campus climate" survey, and the questions (on feelings of inclusion, prevalence of harassment, etc.) included ones keyed to political differences. The questions regarding how to facilitate a campus environment that's inclusive political diversity emanated primarily out of the DEI committee.
That's not because the rest of the faculty is apathetic to the issue. Rather, most issues in academia -- including important issues, including issues which predominantly occupy the public's attention when they deign to think about academia -- don't get thought of that much by most professors, most of the time, for the simple reason that we only have so much time and there is a lot to think about. So we delegate and we divide labor, and the result is that many important issues are reliant on being "picked up" by a specified office or committee within an academic space. And in my experience, the space that "picks up" the issue of intellectual diversity in general and potential feelings of alienation experience by political minorities in particular are the DEI offices and officers -- a role that is entirely overlooked given the near-universally believed dogma that DEI officers are implacably opposed to intellectual diversity in general and conservatives in particular.
We saw a version of this in the fallout of the Kyle Duncan incident at Stanford, where DEI Dean Tirien Steinbach took the fall for how she managed student protests at a Federalist Society event. Almost entirely occluded in the hatefest Steinbach endured as a supposed ideological commissar of DEI wokeness was the fact that the Federalist Society had identify Steinbach as one of its few allies on campus; a figure who stood out precisely because she was invested in ensuring that FedSoc could participate fully and equally in campus life. It is hard to imagine a clear illustration of this paradox -- the assumption that DEI is the enemy of political diversity and inclusivity; the reality that the DEI official was one of the most active proponents of political diversity and inclusivity -- than this.
Now, to be sure, the political form of "inclusion" isn't straightforward -- and in particular, it doesn't map on especially well to how we think about "inclusion" vis-a-vis ascriptive identities like race or religion. Ascriptive identities are not typically thought of as being appropriately subjected to normative criticism. A place where significant members of the population took positions of the form "I think it is illegitimate/immoral/wrong/incorrect to be Black" would be failing to be inclusive of racial difference in an obvious way. I imagine virtually all would think the same regarding religion ("It's wrong to be Jewish"); I'd say the same thing about sexual and gender identity (though here of course many conservatives would disagree, and very much want to defend the legitimacy of those who assert "it is wrong to be gay or trans").
By contrast, ideological orientations are defined by content that by definition is properly the subject of ongoing normative contestation. To be conservative (or liberal, or Marxist, or MAGA) is to endorse a cluster of normative positions which others will inevitably judge as right or wrong, correct or incorrect, or legitimate or illegitimate. A university could not function at the most basic level if members are not allowed to make those judgments (what would it even mean to say that the law school's mission is thwarted when its members make normative appraisals of ideological positions?). Unlike "I think it is wrong to be Jewish", statements of the form "I think it is wrong to oppose gay marriage" or "I think it is wrong to abolish qualified immunity" cannot be viewed as inherently problematic in a university space -- those are exactly the sorts of statements we expect to see, and there is no intrinsic foul just because one's peers think you've taken the wrong side of an ideological controversy.
This doesn't mean there isn't any space to consider how persons who take ideologically dissident positions in a given space can or should be "included". One thing we can (and I think should) say is that healthy respect for intellectual pluralism means we should be tolerant of a wide range of positions on publicly contested issues, even those we disagree with, and generally relate to such positions via the "normal" processes of respectful dialogue, debate, and consideration. Some think we shouldn't abolish qualified immunity, others we should, but even if "abolish qualified immunity" is the consensus position on campus, we should still be willing to think about the issue critically and debate it in a manner that respects the divergent views. Cultivating that sort of respect for ideological plurality seems very healthy, and hopefully can alleviate some feelings of exclusion conservative students might face. But notice that this isn't how I think we envision what "inclusion" looks like for ascriptive identities -- I do not think our goal with respect to antisemitism should be "some people think Jews are okay, and some don't, but the important thing is that we make sure that persons with all range of views on 'are Jews okay' are able to openly debate and discuss the issue." The sorts of interventions that make sense along the axis of ideological orientation are ill-equipped to address racial or religious (or, I think, sex/gender) identity.
So the issue is not straightforward, and the people who act like it is are selling you a bill of goods. The issue of inclusivity towards political diversity on campus is a complex one and one that requires serious thought. But overwhelmingly, the people who are thinking about it in a serious and systematic way -- not as rabble-rousers, not as part of a bad-faith gotcha game trying to sabotage the university -- are found in DEI offices. And I wish they got more credit for the hard work they're putting in.
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