In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. In a field full of buzzwords, our goal is simple: Tell the truth, in plain English, about what’s being proposed and what it means for students, teachers, and parents. We may be wrong and we will frequently disagree, but we’ll try to be candid and ensure that you don’t need a Ph.D. in eduspeak to understand us. Earlier this week we tackled diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Today’s discussion is a continuation of that conversation.
—Rick
Rick: OK, just to recap: Earlier we went back and forth about DEI. You argued that it “emerged as a needed response to the well-documented history of racism and exclusion” in American history, but that its proponents eventually went overboard. This sparked a “vicious cycle” characterized by backlash among conservative critics of DEI and overreaction to that backlash from parts of the left. I noted that there’s room for common ground on DEI, but I also raised the flag about ideologues run amok—including when KIPP charter schools abandoned their “Work hard, Be nice” mantra in order to help “dismantle systemic racism.”
So, to repeat my charge from earlier this week: It strikes me that we need a clearer sense of the principles that can help us find that healthy equilibrium. You’re the Harvard professor. So how do we find it?
Jal: I don’t agree with some of how you have characterized some of the examples you mentioned; for instance, I see limited evidence that many schools are turning away from independence, hard work, individual thinking, and being nice in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And I also see the costs of the things you praise from the right, particularly teachers feeling unable to raise legitimate issues around race, sexuality, or politics in classrooms. But I’m going to resist turning this into a predictable left-right debate and return to our core issue of striking a healthy balance on DEI.
One thing that I think would be helpful would be to try to get away from the “what team are you on” dynamics that tend to characterize these discussions and move toward a more careful consideration of particular claims in particular contexts. Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized synthesized a lot of underlying political science research about polarization and argued that what has happened to politics is that partisans used to be divided by issues but are now divided by identities. When you feel that the other political party is not just someone you disagree with over taxes or social programs but rather an existential threat to your core beliefs and values, then it is easy to demonize the other. DEI has gotten caught up in similar Manichean dynamics in which both sides think that, to quote George W. Bush, “you’re either with us or against us.”
Another thing this will require is for brave folks to speak up when they think that people with whom they are roughly aligned have significantly overreached. As an example, consider the idea that the written word is part of white supremacy culture. If by that someone means that we are overly reliant on technical analyses in written reports and ignore the voices of those closest to the problem, I’m with them. But if they’re saying that Black and brown students don’t need to learn how to write, or that we are somehow disenfranchising those students by assigning them essays in high school, they’ve lost me. If they are saying that we need to broaden the canon to incorporate a wider and more diverse range of authors, I’m with them. But if their argument is that anything written by a dead white male isn’t worth reading, I’m not. We need to challenge folks on our own side of the aisle; otherwise, we will perpetuate the dynamics of an escalating culture war led by those on the extremes.
Finally, I think more discussion of some of the polling you raised in our previous post would be helpful. Writ large, the American people are often more sensible than the self-appointed spokespeople that claim to speak for them. We’ve heard ad nauseam about self-censorship on college campuses, but some of the statistics you cite, like the idea that most Americans favor a balanced approach to history, are less prominent in the public conservation than they should be. The next time conservative politicians go to the bully pulpit to promote killing African-American history or some other such thing, I hope that sensible folks on the right like you will remind them that the people are not actually with them on this.
Rick: That’s a terrific set of suggestions. I especially like the need to remind ourselves—and especially political leaders who raise money and generate enthusiasm by catering to the base—that the lion’s share of Americans are a lot more measured than our putative leaders would have you believe. Much of the problem emerges from Americans on the left and right having fundamental misperceptions about what their counterparts believe, so everyone winds up thinking the worst of the “other side”—and thus clinging tighter to their tribe. This helped DEI enthusiasts intimidate lots of otherwise reasonable teachers and administrators into quietly swallowing some toxic stuff, even as it helps right-wing outrage artists rally otherwise sensible people behind grievance-fueled fever dreams.
The truth is that most people agree with the unremarkable values we’ve articulated but don’t realize how much company they actually have. One of the most valuable resources on this is the “Perception Gap” polling by YouGov and More in Common, which notes that Republicans and Democrats wildly misjudge the other side’s thoughts about patriotism, immigration, and much else. Republicans, for instance, vastly underestimate the share of Democrats who say they’re proud to be an American, while Democrats wildly underestimate the share of Republicans who think legal immigration is good for America.
And it turns out that consuming more media makes us more likely to get the “other side’s” views wrong. I think that goes a long way to understanding why the blue, news-drenched worlds of academe, education, and media tend to reflexively dismiss the right’s legitimate concerns as illicit or manufactured. On AP African-American history, for instance, I flatly disagree with your take. I’ve argued at length that the concerns Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had about the ideological spin of the initial course were wholly reasonable. If you can point to someone who says, “We shouldn’t teach about African American history or have kids read books by Black authors,” I’m 100 percent with you. But I think this was a case where principled concerns about one-sided narratives and politicized curricula got dismissed as bigotry.
I think this is what makes much of the back-and-forth so ugly. Those of us who push back on the excesses of DEI have had the recurring experience of being told that there’s no issue and that we’re racists for suggesting otherwise. Then we get told that there may be some minor issues but that, ultimately, we’re overreacting. And then we get told that this was all just fake news—that, of course, everyone always agreed that schools should celebrate hard work, being nice, and independent thought. The “true history” gets memory-holed. And those of us who were labeled bigots, chased out of universities, and blackballed for saying otherwise are left scarred, wondering where this sensible consensus was when students were being subjected to pernicious dogma and educators to brow-beating.
It’s easy to be magnanimous after the fact. What we need is for those leading the charge on diversity, inclusion, and equity to promote measured wisdom when it counts. If the DEI charge had featured more of that and less ideological freelancing, we might have wound up with practical, popular changes—rather than fodder for yet another culture clash.
Jal: We can agree to disagree on Ron DeSantis. I think what you describe in your own experiences as a conservative critic of DEI is part of why it is so difficult to treat this issue with the kind of calm rationality we are advocating in this piece. When you are, in your own words, “labeled bigots, chased out of universities, and blackballed for saying otherwise,” you aren’t likely to be looking for opportunities to critique your own allies for overreach. And, conversely, if you are a progressive who watched in horror as conservative members of Congress and big donors brought down the female presidents of three universities in short order, you similarly aren’t going to go public with your own internal criticisms of overreaches within higher education. When you’ve been cut to the bone, magnanimity is hard to come by.
Is there any way out of this loop? I’m not sure. But discussing it publicly seems like a good start.
