Christopher Friis
Editor’s note: This piece is one part of a two-part critique on DEI efforts within academia, political spaces, and broader society. Part one can be read here on The Chicago Maroon.
Free expression is the essence of UChicago. President Harper declared this in his 1902 address marking the University’s decennial, and his successors have advanced this idea ad nauseum in the decades since. Furthermore, this fact has been enshrined in two ways: by the Kalven report, a seminal document within academia that sets forth the importance of institutional neutrality on political and social issues; and by the Chicago Principles, which constitute a framework affirming the importance of open discourse on university campuses.
I came to campus seeking refuge in Harper’s ideals. I expected to discover the haven for free expression advertised by former dean of students John Ellison: where ideas were exchanged freely, diverse perspectives flourished, and intellectual growth was nurtured in the absence of “safe spaces.” Instead, I have found the ruins of this distinctive place: a graveyard for the vestiges of Harper’s vision, brimming with monuments to free expression but bereft of its spirit. Responsible for this destruction is our administration and faculty’s enforcement of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) regime.
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There are many competing conceptions of DEI, most of which are influenced by politics. As such, it is worth clarifying the form of DEI at issue in this critique.
What is not the focus here is the DEI of yesterday; that DEI amounted to diversity, equality, and inclusion. It was born from the legal term “affirmative action,” first used in Executive Order 10925, which states government contractors must “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly]…without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” DEI matured into adolescence with later legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Notably, at no point in its youth did DEI authorize group preferences—a prospect one of its fathers, Hubert Humphrey, warned against.
Today’s DEI, the focus of this piece, is unrecognizable from its younger self. To be realized, this bastardized DEI (hereafter “DEI”) requires radical, corrective action against racial inequity. This entails legitimizing racism on the basis of consequentialism, that is, normalizing a belief that the (ephemeral) end goal of equity warrants discrimination against non-underrepresented minorities (URMs). Quotaism instantiates this philosophy. Put another way, DEI is a mandate to discriminate in disguise; it is unlawful segregationist ideology masquerading as inclusivity. It does not demand equality but a Nietzschean inversion of power dynamics that renders imagined oppressors the oppressed.
White Knights of URMs (WURMs) and their ilk are responsible for the perversion of DEI. These are well-meaning but hypocritical individuals who advance their emotional and material interests at the expense of others. They do so from a self-assumed moral high ground. Reasoning with WURMs is futile; they do not participate in reality. Instead, their minds are trapped in a fiction wherein URMs are hopelessly stuck in the Jim Crow era.
To that end, WURMs engineered DEI to be a means of catharsis. Through it, they have established a value system that ascribes URMs’ deficiencies to omnipotent bogeymans, such as systemic racism. WURMs did this to psychologically enslave us. They do not want URMs to have mental agency, for us to consider ourselves as their equals—hence they were not satisfied with diversity, equality, and inclusion. Instead, they want control: to force URMs to internalize a victim mentality, position themselves as our saviors, and thereby absolve themselves of guilt they have assumed for the distant past.
Put bluntly, DEI is selfish. It scapegoats the external world for URMs’ failings (e.g., wealthy and educated groups—namely, whites and Asians) so WURMs can satiate their savior complex.
Moreover, WURMs’ race worship has sociological consequences. For one, it renders URMs paranoid; DEI conditions URMs to imagine oppression where it does not exist, to see adversaries in potential allies by interpreting every interaction through the lens of racial conflict. Jussie Smollett and Bubba Wallace are testaments to this psychosis. Furthermore, not only does DEI distract from the causes of inequality and cheapen our accomplishments with a badge of inferiority, but it also undermines mutual respect between races. How can overrepresented groups respect URMs when we have cheated to get onto campus? Ultimately, DEI is as unfair to us as it is to those it discriminates against.
Despite this, academia enforces DEI through several mechanisms. Ideologically-motivated hiring practices are one of them. A 2021 study found that 68 percent of a representative sample of higher education faculty job postings included the terms “diversity” or “diverse” in some fashion. A further one-fifth of advertisements required applicants to write statements supporting diversity, with evidence suggesting this practice is becoming routine. These and other ideological litmus tests repel candidates opposed to DEI dogma, thereby rendering universities DEI indoctrination mills. Given this, is it any wonder why Americans’ confidence in higher education is at historic lows?
Discriminatory admissions practices are academia’s favorite method of enforcing DEI. Data from the Association of Medical Colleges shows that Black medical school applicants are more than nine times more likely than Asians and more than seven times more likely than whites with similar GPA and MCAT scores to be admitted. Another study found that the admit rates for typical Black applicants to Harvard are, on average, over four times higher than if they had been treated as white. Furthermore, racial preferences resulted in an over 70 percent increase in the African American admit rate for in-state applicants to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For out-of-state applicants, the increase was more than tenfold. These facts are damning evidence that DEI holds URMs to inferior standards in academia, rendering us statistically likely to be less competent than our overrepresented peers. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s disgraced president who plagiarized her research, and other charlatans from URMs in academia who wield power despite their deficiencies, are proof.
In sum, DEI is a destructive ideology that manipulates racial dynamics for the benefit of a select few under the guise of altruism. It renders victimhood a virtue, pits races against each other, and enforces disparate standards in academia to the detriment of overrepresented groups and URMs alike.
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As Professor Dorian Abbot remarked in 2021, nearly every decision on college campuses—from admissions, to course content, to pedagogy—is made through the lens of DEI ideology. UChicago is no exception. While our administration does not claim to practice brazen forms of discrimination such as quotaism, it fosters DEI in other ways. Faculty are complicit in this cause. The result of this concerted effort is twofold: URMs on campus are dehumanized in the aforementioned ways, and the University’s commitment to free expression is eroded.
Identity-based hiring and pedagogy philosophies are two of the University’s DEI mechanisms. Consider the Office of the Provost’s DEI planning material. This propaganda handbook exists to “improve hiring and promotion practices” in departments so they can achieve their “diversity and inclusion goals.” Among its other mandates, it instructs departments to “Consider the role of race in the curriculum and the experience of Black people in the classroom” and “Consider the diversity of [their] leadership team[s]. If [they are] not diverse, then consider [their] recruitment and hiring practices.” It is demonstrably true that these directives entail unlawfully discriminating against overrepresented groups: recently, the social science research institute NORC at the University settled with more than 100 Asian job applicants after the U.S. Department of Labor found it engaged in hiring discrimination against them in favor of hiring more Hispanic applicants. Moreover, the University’s Inclusive Pedagogy website presents a methodology for faculty to tailor their teaching to comply with DEI. For instance, beneath a breakdown of UChicago’s racial and ethnic demographics, it instructs faculty to “be proactive” by choosing course content created by people of “different backgrounds” to make URMs feel special.
The most egregious instances of DEI on campus are institutionalized. Two examples of this are the Office of the Provost’s Diversity and Inclusion division and the Center for Identity + Inclusion. These serve as the University’s ministries of DEI propaganda, mechanisms for it to enforce DEI ideology on campus through patronizing, token gestures like inclusion workshops and segregated congregations for Black students. The WURMs of these bureaus collude with “diversity liaisons” from departments across the university to advance DEI. They also conspire with other institutions via the Faculty Advancement Network to advance radical reforms in the name of DEI, namely by “reimagin[ing] the norms, structures, policies, and programs that shape university cultures and the academic workforce.”
Finally, the Admissions Office can be considered a bastion of DEI on campus1. It is no secret that the University factors race into its admissions decisions in line with other private institutions, a practice confirmed by its 2021–2022 Common Data Set submission. The University does not disclose test score statistics for the race of its admits. However, if the *Maroon’s* Class of 2020 survey is any indication, it is likely the University has maintained disparate test score standards for applicants based on race for years. This is unsurprising given the NORC debacle.
Ultimately, there are countless methods through which the University enforces DEI. While they may seem trivial in isolation, their sum effect has grave implications. Each of the University’s DEI tools is related by their function: to enact ideological conformity. To that end, DEI is incompatible with UChicago’s tenets because it is didactic; to be realized, DEI demands psychological submission to its ideals, and teaching students what to think rather than how. This is antithetical to the University’s purported commitments to neutrality and free expression.
The Freedom of Expression Committee Report (FECR) plainly states that “it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” And yet, the aforementioned mechanisms to regulate thought on campus clearly do this. By framing diversity and inclusivity as moral imperatives, conditioning faculty to impose them, and erecting departments to reify them, the University has created an environment that demands conformity to DEI. While this climate welcomes aesthetic diversity, it is hostile toward intellectual diversity.
Moreover, in addition to desecrating the FECR, the University’s enforcement of DEI also contradicts the Kalven report. This document demands that “the university [be] the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” The University has defied this principle by enforcing DEI. Administrators and faculty routinely act as self-anointed “critics” on behalf of the University by endorsing or otherwise furthering DEI, thereby chilling diverse thought. This is instantiated by the endorsement of hundreds of UChicago educators for anti-Israel protestors who recently occupied campus and the die-in many of them recently staged. The ideological bias of University educators is further demonstrated by the English Department’s endorsement of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its decision to only accept applications “interested in working in and with Black Studies” during the 2020–21 Ph.D. graduate admissions cycle. Advocating such beliefs in one’s personal life is one thing. Doing so when acting as representatives of the University violates institutional neutrality by aligning the University with an ideological agenda. As a result, students cannot feel confident that they can explore, debate, and develop their ideas without fear of institutional retribution.
The University’s ideological bias is yet further revealed by the double standards it maintains regarding free expression. Consider the administration’s response to the siege of campus by anti-Israel protesters; in a show of the administration’s partisanship, Alivisatos permitted the encampment to remain for over a week despite conceding it violated University policy. Furthermore, last year, faculty and administrators fiercely defended pro-DEI radical Professor Rebecca Journey and her anti-white rhetoric by invoking the Chicago Principles. Meanwhile, many of them decry critics of DEI on or invited to campus like Bret Stephens—in some instances, like in the case of Richard Spencer, denying them opportunities to speak.
Our administration’s explicit endorsements of DEI also prove how it acts as a “critic” of thought. Consider Provost Katherine Baicker’s December 18 email to the University community regarding results from last May’s Campus Climate Survey, in which she writes, “[The administration’s] longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion is crucial to promoting a culture of free expression by fostering an environment where different perspectives are valued and respected.” This statement has two implications. First, much like the University’s DEI bureaus, it proves that the University is distracted—that its priorities have shifted from upholding this place’s distinctive culture to openly defying it in pursuit of, in Baicker’s own words, “diversity and inclusion.” Second, and more concerningly, it reveals how our administration distorts the University’s core values to advance DEI.
The administration attempts to reconcile its ideological bias with the Kalven and Chicago principles by asserting that DEI promotes “a culture of free expression.” This claim is both unfounded and self-contradictory. Free expression necessitates an environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed and debated on equal footing, not where a singular ideology is “valued and respected” over others.
This is all to suggest that the University is no longer a “home and sponsor” of critics as the Kalven report mandates. Instead, it has become a critic that only sponsors WURMs. Though the administration may not mandate statements endorsing DEI like other institutions, it repeatedly signals its support for ideological homogeneity. This has proven effective in attracting like-minded faculty. As the encampments have shown, such bias from UChicago’s leadership has also enabled identity-obsessed outrage to supplant critical and independent thought among students and faculty alike. No longer a place of learning, our university has been turned into a daycare, replete with safe spaces (in both the literal and figurative sense) to coddle the minds of self-proclaimed victims.
The professors who recently published an op-ed advocating DEI in the *Maroon* further demonstrate how UChicago’s core values are bastardized by WURMs on campus. Fortunately, their simplistic reasoning presents obvious flaws:
The professors argue that DEI promotes rigorous inquiry because it corrects for historical biases, thereby ensuring academia can attract “top talent.” This assertion is unfounded. DEI efforts do not inherently attract “top talent” because they prioritize aesthetics over skill; for example, they ignore objective metrics of academic preparedness, such as SAT scores, in the name of equity. Best among a demographic is not best among all. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that diversity for the sake of it does not yield material benefits.
The professors dismiss colorblind/merit-based policies as “pure fiction” because they cannot provide a “full picture of the true potential of a candidate.” At a minimum, colorblind/merit-based policies humanize people by recognizing that “true potential” is decided by more than race. The same cannot be said for the DEI policies that the professors advocate, which presume that one’s ability to self-actualize is captured by their skin color. Such thinking aligns with race realist ideology that posits race, an innate characteristic, determines potential. (If the professors identify with race realism—if they believe there is an inherent genetic basis for between-group variations in intelligence—then they ought to provide evidence in support of it.)
The professors dismiss criticism that DEI policies are “ideological, political, discriminatory, [or] patronizing” by asserting such policies “are uncontroversial and effective tools that represent standard practices that are widely implemented in academia and industry.” These are not factual assessments. The idea that DEI is not discriminatory is unfounded, given evidence is abundant that it discriminates against whites and Asians—particularly in university admissions. Furthermore, the claim that DEI policies are “uncontroversial” because they are “widely implemented” is false. Many in academia object to DEI but suppress their views for fear of persecution. Consider former Georgetown professor Sandra Seller, who was fired for remarking that her Black students performed objectively worse academically than their non-Black peers.
The professors assert the results of scientific inquiry “should not depend on the person pursuing the science.” This statement contradicts their rationale for supporting DEI. Why do they fixate on the race of “the person pursuing the science” throughout their piece if that is supposedly irrelevant?
Strip away the sophistry and flowery prose, and it is clear that arguments defending DEI at UChicago and elsewhere in academia are meritless. Even if one disagrees with DEI being political in nature, the lengths our faculty and administration go to enforce it cultivates homogenous thought. This is antithetical to the University’s core values.
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Ironically, the Universities of Wisconsin System (UW) upholds the Chicago and Kalven principles better than UChicago. Recently, it froze hiring for diversity positions, dropped an affirmative action faculty hiring initiative at UW-Madison, and created a position at the flagship campus focused on conservative thought as a counterbalance for the DEI sentiments on its campuses. MIT has recently followed in UW’s footsteps by banning diversity statements. If UChicago is to live up to Harper’s vision, it must do likewise.
Administrators and faculty must stop enforcing DEI under the pretext that the ephemeral objectives of equity justify desecrating the University’s core values. Our administration must pursue what Professor Abbott calls Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE): “evidence-based and non-ideological” projects, whereby students and faculty are treated as individuals and evaluated on qualifications alone. This entails re-instating a mandatory standardized test score policy for applicants, a practice that recent research has shown yields substantial predictive power for academic success in college. It also requires leveling criminal charges against administrators and faculty who continue to defy the law through race-conscious practices.
The University has already implemented MFE in part via merit scholarships. I argue that similar initiatives geared toward underprivileged applicants (e.g., the Odyssey Scholars program) are equally as important and logically consistent with MFE—providing they do not consider race or gender. Should Alivisatos refuse to fully commit the University to MFE, then he must be ousted by UChicago’s Board of Trustees. Otherwise, the Board will have failed in its responsibility of enabling the University to “fulfill its mission for current and future generations.” The University’s mission is first and foremost to uphold its values contained in the Kalven report and the FECR. Alivisatos has defied both in permitting DEI to tyrannize free inquiry and expression on our campus. He must be held accountable.
The supremacy of MFE is an inevitability; it will prevail at UChicago and elsewhere in academia with or without WURMs’ surrender. In outlawing affirmative action, the Roberts Court has enabled MFE to flourish by initiating the second-greatest emancipation in America’s history—one that it will see through over the next several decades it remains in power. WURMs can either submit to MFE now or have their legacies be irrevocably sullied by their complicity in perpetuating a racist regime as MFE ascends.
Moreover, the pursuit of MFE is neither ideological nor political. Rather, it is a dispassionate remedy to emancipate academia’s marketplace of ideas and humanize everyone in its ranks. For all their differences, proponents and opponents of DEI share a common ground: a desire for fairness. Ultimately, at stake in the fight against DEI is both Harper’s vision and solutions for URMs to achieve true equality in society at large.
Author Footnotes:
The Chinese refer to these people as baizuo.
WURMs cite last June’s Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruling restricting race-based admissions in academia as proof that DEI has been eradicated from academia. Do not be fooled by this shameless attempt to trivialize DEI’s racist nature. While June’s SCOTUS decision restricted race-based admissions, they were not eliminated; universities continue to consider race in other ways to smuggle us onto their campuses, such as via application essays. Academia’s racist DEI regime is alive and well, albeit increasingly clandestine.
Consider her planned course entitled “The Problem of Whiteness,” which the University approved and scheduled before public outcry led to it being postponed.
In 2015, the mean score on the math section of the SAT for all test-takers was 511 out of 800. The average scores for Black (428) and Latino (457) students were significantly below those of white (534) and Asian (598) students.
One argument against colorblind programs that consider economic standing is that they can be exploited to manufacture aesthetic diversity in the same way as affirmative action. The question of whether that happens in practice warrants its own article.