Back to Basics: DEI and the Purpose of Higher Education 

With the Trump administration ratcheting up the pressure on already reeling colleges, higher education is beginning to take a long overdue look at DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives on campuses. So far, both Team Red and Team Blue have taken an all-or-nothing approach to DEI—an approach that is conspicuously out of touch with the broader public. With both major political parties missing the boat on DEI, higher education has an opportunity to win back the public’s trust by taking the initiative on rebuilding civic ties.  

An important first step is to depoliticize DEI—and higher education in general. I think the best way to do this is by returning to the basics. It’s only when we keep the purpose of colleges firmly in view that we can discern a proper, nonpolitical role for DEI on campuses. What are universities for? And how does defining their purpose help us determine which aspects of DEI should stay and which should go?  

The Purpose of Institutions of Higher Learning 

How can we determine the purpose of the university? In a famous passage, Aristotle suggests that determining the purpose or function of human beings requires setting aside what humans have in common with other living things and identifying what’s distinctive or unique about them. Similarly, I would argue that if we want to know what the purpose of the university is, we need to identify what distinguishes them from other institutions.  

Reflections on Aristotle led Jonathan Haidt to conclude that the purpose of universities is the discovery of truth. I think this is close but not quite right. For one thing, many other institutions aim to discover the truth. Scientific organizations (like the Royal Society), government agencies (like the NSF and NIH), and the press are a few examples. For another, many of the oldest disciplines like law, medicine, classics, ethics, and rhetoric (not to mention more recent disciplines like English Literature or Fine Arts), would be hard to characterize as having the primary purpose of discovering truth.  

Others have suggested job training or social justice as the purpose of the university. But these proposals fall prey to similar objections. Many core disciplines, like philosophy, while very useful in the work world, are not specifically geared to job training, and many other institutions besides universities provide job training. Likewise, there is a wide variety of institutions that concern themselves with social justice while many disciplines have no direct bearing on social justice.  

I want to suggest, following my friend Stewart Goetz’s analysis of C. S. Lewis’s work, that the primary purpose of universities is to provide a home for those who enjoy the life of the mind—i.e., faculty. Secondarily, they are places where students can come and, for a time, share in the pleasures of inquiry, learning, contemplation, and the like. This isn’t the place to make a full-throated defense of this claim. But it should be obvious that there are no other institutions that exist for the sole purpose of giving a home to those who take pleasure in the life of the mind.  

To those who might contend that taxpayers would never support such a seemingly impractical enterprise, all of the social benefits that come from university education—the discovery of new truths, the promotion of social justice, job training, and much more—are best produced when they are the indirect consequence of giving talented people a place to freely pursue the life of the mind. Whenever we try to instrumentalize the university for some other purpose, the results are disastrous. Instead of truth, we get propaganda; instead of social justice, prejudice; instead of job training, degree mills.  

If providing a home for people who love learning is the university’s purpose, then everything else that the university does needs to be aligned with this goal, and that includes DEI. If we keep this purpose firmly in view, then we can discern the proper limits and proper role of DEI initiatives. 

DEI Overreach 

Polling shows that a significant part of the reason why, as studies show, universities have lost the public’s trust over the past decade is that they are perceived as engaging in political activism. DEI trainings are a frequent target of such criticisms. For example, some DEI trainings involve consciousness-raising. Such trainings could, I think, fairly be characterized as what Pierre Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” or what Michel Foucault calls “technologies of the self.” I am not making the overwrought claim, associated with figures like John McWhorter and Eric Kaufmann, that “wokeness” is a religion, a characterization that I have argued produces more anger than clarity. Rather, spiritual exercises of the kind that Hadot and Foucault have in mind have been common not just to what we now call “religion” but also to philosophy and the sciences. The object of spiritual exercises is to effect a transformation of the self through a set of practices. The goal might be the rigorously self-examining self of the confessing Christian, the placid, imperturbable self of the Stoic, or the self-effacing, “objective” self of the scientist.  

In the case of DEI training, the practices employed are, I think, meant to shape the self to perceive otherwise invisible oppression and to instinctually combat it. This is done by teaching new concepts or “schemas” and encouraging attendees to practice using them to understand the social world. These schemas are meant to guide not just conscious interpretation but to penetrate to the level of experience itself. Examples can be found in DEI standbys like “microaggressions,” “implicit bias,” “white privilege,” and “white supremacy culture.”  

The effect is to instill what hermeneutic philosophers call, with a nod to the work of Paul Ricoeur, “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” The hermeneutics of suspicion is an interpretive method that seeks to reveal the hidden causes of everyday phenomena. What may appear, on the surface, to be an innocuous social interaction may show itself, under the interpretive lens provided by the “masters of suspicion”—e.g., Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud—to be motivated by subterranean and often unconscious desires for power, money, or sex. Through exercises involving various concepts and schemas, the hermeneutics of suspicion is transformed from an interpretive lens into a way of being; the goal is a new self with a new way of experiencing and moving through the world. 

Some argue that trainings involving such schemas are indoctrination or even a form of anti-white racism. But one need not go that far to argue that they are inappropriate; we need to keep in mind the purpose of universities. If we accept the framework of the university as a sanctuary for the life of the mind, the only spiritual exercises that would be appropriate are those that seek to instill relevant virtues: open-mindedness, honesty, curiosity, and the like. A substantial part of the joy of the life of the mind is being able to see the world from a multiplicity of perspectives. Insofar as trainings treat the hermeneutics of suspicion as the only legitimate way to inhabit the social world (functioning as a corneal transplant rather than a lens, to use the Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf’s colorful wording) they foster dispositions that inhibit enjoying the life of the mind and are, to that extent, not consistent with the purpose of universites.  

I am not saying that concepts and schemas like those mentioned above can’t be discussed on campus. I vehemently reject the Trump administration’s often reckless attempts to eradicate DEI and DEI-related research and teaching. But students should examine these ideas not in trainings but in lecture halls and seminar rooms, where they can fully consider, reflect on, and engage with them. Shaping individuals to believe there is only one appropriate way to interpret the social world is inconsistent with the purpose of the university. 

A Proper Role for DEI 

Some aspects of DEI initiatives, when done well, are nonpolitical and support the purpose of the university. I will focus on just two examples: cultivating a welcoming environment on campus and promoting access to universities. 

Having sat on my university’s DEI committee for two years, I have seen that it is deeply committed to creating a welcoming and supportive campus environment, especially by keeping an eye out for people on campus who might otherwise be overlooked, for example, religious minorities, people with mental health conditions or learning disabilities, first-generation students, and others. In so doing, DEI committees perform a valuable service to institutions by checking their “blind spots” to ensure that students who want to share in the life of the mind are not only included but feel seen and known.  

Another place where DEI committees have a role to play is by promoting access. There are many talented individuals who would like to take part in the life of the mind but who aren’t considered “college material.” This could be because they don’t fit the standard “model” of a college student or because they haven’t been given the opportunities they should have. DEI can help remove roadblocks for such students. Low-stakes interventions might involve developing methods for identifying such individuals and setting aside seats to give them a shot at proving themselves.  

This may strike some readers as being anti-meritocratic, as if we are giving seats to students who simply haven’t earned the right to be there. But consider the following analogy. In professional sports, teams do not simply draft college athletes on the basis of past merit, e.g., those who have the best stats in college. Instead, they often draft an athlete that they believe has the most potential or the highest ceiling. This often means drafting someone who is younger, less experienced, or who has raw athletic ability but inferior stats. Teams do this in the hope that in the future, the selected athlete will outperform those who may have better numbers in college. Similarly, it’s reasonable to admit to college those high school students with the great grades and test scores from top schools. But it also makes sense to take chances on students who have perhaps had inferior training and opportunities but show tremendous potential (a higher ceiling). Considering potential is not intrinsically anti-merit; it’s an attempt to consider future merit alongside past merit. 

Universities could do even more for those who are disadvantaged. High-stakes interventions might include attempting to address pipeline issues. I like Roland Fryer’s provocative suggestion that if wealthy colleges advertise themselves as being “pro-DEI” or “pro-social justice,” they should be willing to put their money where their mouth is and invest in feeder schools.  

At the same time, institutions need to revisit how they pursue these goals. If the purpose of universities is to provide a home for faculty, then this probably means that DEI offices (as opposed to, say, DEI committees) are out of place on campuses. While DEI initiatives can be useful to check an institution’s blind spots, they are poorly equipped to check their own. This weakness is only exacerbated by the siloing and insulating effects of a discrete office. They have been slow to recognize, for example, that problems of feeling unwelcome and lack of access aren’t limited to the traditional DEI categories of race, sex, and gender identity. One way to mitigate these deficiencies is for DEI work on campus to be done by a committee that has an advisory role rather than an office with its own staff.  

Moreover, DEI offices require a lot of resources: resources that, given the purpose of universities, should be dedicated to faculty. This doesn’t mean that we abandon DEI; it means that we put it as much as possible into the hands of faculty. Faculty members are already required to engage in service. Many faculty, given their research interests, probably would be happy to serve on DEI committees. An added benefit of redirecting resources to faculty members is that students’ exposure to full-time faculty members is correlated with higher retention rates. Given that students who have trouble gaining access to universities are likely to be the most vulnerable to attrition, hiring more full-time faculty should be part of any DEI initiative. Those additional faculty members would in turn increase the faculty’s service capacity and enable them to contribute to productive DEI work. When DEI is aligned with the purpose of the university, both can thrive.   

If we’re going to rebuild the public’s trust in universities, we need to take concrete steps toward depoliticizing DEI and our institutions. As institutions examine their DEI initiatives and consider what to keep and what to eliminate, they should do so with the purpose of the university in mind. If they do, they’ll see that, consistent with public opinion, DEI has a role to play. Properly ordered, it should focus on goals like promoting access to the life of the mind and ensuring that people from all walks of life feel welcome on campuses. If, however, we allow universities to be perceived as hotbeds of activism, then the political pressure on them may continue to be ratcheted up until they break. If universities lose their purpose, their demise will quickly follow. 

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