The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?

A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever

By Nicholas Confessore of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.” Doctoral students in educational studies must take an “equity lab” and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions."

"Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.”

At the art museum, captions for an exhibit of American and European art attest to histories of oppression “even in works that may not appear to have any direct relation to these histories.” The English department has adopted a 245-word land acknowledgment, describing its core subject as “a language brought by colonizers to North America.” Even Michigan’s business school, according to its D.E.I. web page, is committed to fighting “all forms of oppression.”"

"Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016"

"Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching."

"some of Michigan’s peer institutions have soured on aspects of D.E.I. Last spring, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences said they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity statements; such “compelled statements,” M.I.T.’s president said, “impinge on freedom of expression.”"

"Michigan hasn’t joined the retreat. Instead, it has redoubled its efforts"

"the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241, according to figures compiled by Mark J. Perry"

"I found a different kind of backlash building, one that emanated not from Washington or right-wing think tanks but from inside the university’s own dorms and faculty lounges. On Michigan’s largely left-leaning campus, few of the people I met questioned the broad ideals of diversity or social justice. Yet the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain."

"many Black students today regard the school’s expansive program as a well-meaning failure. The university now has a greater proportion of Hispanic, Asian and first-generation students and a more racially diverse staff. But in a state where 14 percent of residents are Black, the school’s Black undergraduate enrollment has long hovered stubbornly at around 4 percent"

"On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read."

"the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics"

"Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion."

"As the “diversity rationale” spread throughout academia and business, according to the scholar Frederick R. Lynch, the notion of diversity as a form of reparations began to broaden and blur. Schools now needed diversity to prepare citizens for America’s multicultural future; corporations needed diversity to serve an increasingly global customer base."

"Drawing on a growing body of post-Bakke research, school experts argued that students not only learned “in deeper, more complex ways” in a diverse setting but also emerged better equipped to thrive in a multiracial democracy"

"D.E.I. research flourished throughout academia, making the case that schools could harvest the benefits of diversity only if they intervened decisively in campus life and the classroom."

"Over the four decades following Bakke, according to a recent study from the Progressive Policy Institute, the ranks of full-time college administrators increased more than twice as fast as student enrollment. Their primary job was to enhance “student life” — and attract more customers."

"The Ann Arbor campus grew to have nearly 16,000 nonfaculty employees, more than twice the number of full-time faculty members."

"These growing bureaucracies represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power. Administrators were even more politically liberal than faculty members"

"They promulgated what Lyell Asher, a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, has called “an alternate curriculum,” taught not in classrooms but in dorms, disciplinary hearings and orientation programs."

"The former president of one top research institution recalled for me how students once came to his office with demands, presented in a kind of theatrical performance, to enhance the university’s D.E.I. program. The former president, who asked for anonymity for fear of risking his present job, later learned that some of the program’s senior staff members had worked with and encouraged the students to pressure the administration on their behalf."

[D.E.I. 1.0]  "The initial planning ultimately yielded nearly 2,000 “action items” across campus — a tribute to Michigan’s belief in the power of bureaucratic process to promote change. “It’s important to focus on our standard operating procedures and worry less about attitudes,” said Sellers [psychologist Robert M. Sellers], who was appointed Michigan’s first chief diversity officer. “Attitudes will follow.”" 

"In the year or so after Trump took office, the school’s Bias Response Team examined more than 150 student complaints, sometimes confronting students or faculty members over supposedly offensive classroom comments or social media posts. It was unclear if Michigan was, in fact, becoming a more hateful place. A lawsuit filed by Speech First, a conservative advocacy group, charged that Michigan was subjecting students to expansive, subjective definitions of harassment and bias"

"Other administrators and D.E.I. leads, however, found Sellers’s program a distraction from such work. Some felt that the monthly meetings Sellers’s office convened were overly focused on the process of writing plans and reports. One-on-one discussion with his deputies could have the feel of a box-checking exercise. “I would put on a good show,” said one former dean, herself a woman of color. “I would say, ‘We had meetings with students, we did this, we did that, we made posters.’ We were jumping through hoops, and that’s what they wanted to see.” Like other current and former deans, she asked to remain anonymous because, as she put it, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.”

On their private text-messaging group, deans across the university grumbled about the mountains of data they were required to submit each year. Their public progress reports and D.E.I. strategic plans were heavily vetted by the university counsel’s office and Sellers’s team; the resulting public documents, though meant to ensure accountability, were often both lengthy and vague. “No one knew what they were supposed to be doing,” the former dean said. “And no one would tell us. But we had to show that we were doing something.”

At the same time, Sellers and his allies began building what amounted to a parallel hiring system, giving them a more direct role in reshaping Michigan’s faculty. Proposal 2 expressly prohibited racial or gender preferences in hiring. But in 2016, Michigan began a new program called the Collegiate Fellows, reserved for postdoctoral scholars “in all liberal-arts fields who are committed to diversity in the academy.” Based at the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, Michigan’s largest division, the program provided additional budget dollars with each fellow hired, a further incentive to department chairs."

"out of the 49 new faculty members subsequently hired through the program, 80 percent were people of color, according to a university spokeswoman. (In an interview last year, Chavous put the total even higher.) Their research interests included “the epistemic exclusion of diverse practitioners within the academy,” critical food studies and how Indian transgender activists “appropriate normative U.S.-centric conceptions of gender rights as human rights.”"

"it was almost universally understood among professors I spoke with that these programs were intended to generate racial and gender diversity without explicitly using affirmative action"

"Professors across the university described to me how, in faculty meetings and on search committees, they had resigned themselves to a pervasive double-think around hiring."

"By the spring of 2020, Michigan was reaching the final stage of its first 5-year D.E.I. plan. But in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis police officer that May, as protests erupted around the country and demands to root out racism echoed from campuses to corporate offices, none of the training and programming — the money and new hires and promises — seemed to matter."

"At the law school, which had a longstanding policy of not commenting on events “outside the Quad,” students demanded a public statement about Floyd’s murder. The Black Law Students Association issued further demands, including mandatory antiracism training, more mental health counseling and the hiring of a professor in critical race theory."

"D.E.I. consultants, Jerry Kang and Devon Carbado . . . invited students and faculty to share their experiences of racism and discrimination at the university. Yet for all the heated public rhetoric, people with knowledge of the discussions told me, some of the examples seemed to them relatively minor."

"a professor had asked a white student to read aloud from the landmark Supreme Court decision Cooper v. Aaron, which forced the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock, Ark. The 1958 decision contained the term “Negro,” which some students said was offensive."

"In early 2021, the entire law faculty was invited to a session provided through Michigan’s Spectrum Center, which serves the school’s L.G.B.T.Q. community. Many professors joined the Zoom, desperate for help navigating classroom moments that had become dangerously charged. Instead, the session was devoted to gender terminology, pronoun usage and sexual identity. The facilitator urged them to require students to declare their preferred pronouns and furnished a list of dozens of sexual orientations, some of which professors told me they had never heard of. Instead of asking students about their sexuality, they were advised, faculty should ask students to specify their “attractionality.”"

"That September, the department convened a workshop led by Whitney Peoples, then the coordinator for critical race pedagogies at Michigan’s in-house teaching consultancy, known as the Center for Research on Learning & Teaching. The workshop was titled “Teaching Texts That Contain Racist Language,” but according to one person who attended, Peoples argued that literary works containing slurs should almost never be assigned in the first place."

"In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates like Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period."

"in November 2022, the B.S.U. issued a scathing attack on D.E.I. 1.0 titled “More Than Four.” Despite the many millions spent on D.E.I. 1.0, the report noted, the percentage of Black students — then around 4 percent — was nearly as low as it was in 1970."

"Michigan’s all-embracing D.E.I. program was, in a sense, too inclusive. It suffered from “structural flaws” that caused it to “systematically neglect” Black students — the very people who inspired D.E.I. 1.0 in the first place. The university “actively perpetuates systemic racism and oppression,” the B.S.U. charged, by “failing to directly denounce and combat anti-Blackness.”"

"That same year [2022], Chavous was promoted to chief diversity officer, succeeding her husband, who remains a professor at Michigan. In 2023, the university announced that it would expand Chavous’s Collegiate Fellows program. It would hire even more scholars “committed to diversity in the academy.” When I asked her how many of the fellows hired so far advanced right-leaning arguments about diversity or inequity, Chavous responded that the program favored “a commitment to broadening access, to engaging in equity in one’s discipline and field. So we’re not asking about any particular ideological or political stance.”

In practice, of course, those commitments can themselves be ideological stances. In a dissenting report to the committee urging Michigan to continue requiring diversity statements in hiring, Chandra Sripada, a professor of philosophy and psychiatry, argued that asking candidates to detail how they would advance equity inevitably required them to take particular positions about contested social issues. When Sripada asked Michigan colleagues to evaluate a hypothetical diversity statement that called for de-emphasizing “the axes of identity on which we differ” in classrooms and to make admissions a “level playing field,” one of them called it “career suicide.”

Officially, Michigan’s D.E.I. plan includes a pledge to increase political diversity on campus. When I asked Chavous if there were any programs aimed at achieving that goal, she described an effort by the new dean of the Ford School for public policy to ensure that its curriculum exposed students to a range of political perspectives. By most accounts, conservatives remain a small minority at Michigan, perhaps 10 or 15 percent of all students. There had always been social pressure to conform to the prevailing liberalism there, faculty members and students told me. But it seemed to intensify as D.E.I. expanded, as if the peer pressure had a kind of institutional sanction.

In 2022, after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, students at the medical school demanded that administrators cancel a speech by Kristin M. Collier, an internist and clinical professor there, at a ceremony welcoming new medical students. Collier directs the school’s program on health, spirituality and religion. She is also a Christian who has publicly discussed her opposition to abortion — a viewpoint the students considered disqualifying. A petition demanded that Collier, who was selected by student and faculty members of a school honor society, be replaced with someone who would inspire students “to be courageous advocates for patient autonomy and our communities.”

Though her speech went forward, Michigan assigned her a bodyguard. Security was heightened at the clinic where she delivered care."

"Michigan, she noted, had many programs that explored racial and ethnic identity, but few on religious identity, like hers."

"For a large swath of students and professors, Michigan’s D.E.I. initiatives have become simply background noise, like the rote incantations of a state religion."

"Even within the academy, though, some long-accepted precepts of D.E.I. are coming under closer scrutiny. Some researchers argue that teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable instead of empowered. Psychologists have questioned whether implicit bias can be accurately measured or reduced through training. The notion that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial encounters is widespread in D.E.I. programs; a 2021 review of the microaggressions literature, however, judged it “without adequate scientific basis.”"

"Many faculty members I spoke to worried that Michigan’s press to ingrain D.E.I. into their scholarship — the diversity statements, the special fellowships, the clamor for research into contemporary social-justice issues — had narrowed its departments rather than broadening them. Disciplines and historical eras that couldn’t be jammed into an equity framework were being left to wither; even academics from minority backgrounds felt they had to present themselves as scholars of equity in order to advance."

"One recent analysis by the political scientist Kevin Wallsten found that the larger the D.E.I. bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students."

"even some liberal scholars believe D.E.I. looms too large. Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I. is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity inherently means friction.”"

"in the tumult that followed the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. A spate of unsettling events unfolded in Ann Arbor, eerily echoing the racist provocations at the dawn of D.E.I. 1.0. Someone painted a red X through a Star of David on the Rock; one Jewish student found “Yall R Jewish” scrawled on her dorm whiteboard, near the mezuza affixed to her doorway. Another Star of David was scrawled on benches outside the campus Hillel, this time with an equal sign and a swastika."

"The school’s formidable bureaucracy seemed both paralyzed and heavy-handed, scorned by many students and divided against itself."

"Many Jewish students and alumni were astonished when, in January, a committee of Michigan D.E.I. leaders gave the school’s Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award to a pro-Palestine student group and its leader, a senior named Salma Hamamy: The group had issued a statement on Oct. 7 justifying the murder of Israeli civilians."

"This June, civil rights officials at the federal Department of Education found that Michigan had systematically mishandled student complaints over the 18-month period ending in February. Out of 67 complaints of harassment or discrimination based on national origin or ancestry that the officials reviewed — an overwhelming majority involving allegations of antisemitism, according to a tally I obtained — Michigan had investigated and made findings in just one."

"At the school of social work, some students complained that instructors were not talking enough about the unfolding war; others wanted them to weigh in less. Few felt safe talking to one another. Daicia Price, the school’s D.E.I. director and a clinical professor, was pressed to weigh in on behalf of the school. At one point, she recalled, a student lectured her that there was “a place in hell” for people who remained neutral about the war."