The Great DEI Debate

Special Event at the First SOIBS Conference -- Which You Never Got at Any of the "Major" Conferences

My prior Substack essay described the first conference of the new Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (SOIBS). One of the great reasons to embrace open inquiry, and one of the reasons I helped found the new society, is to create intellectual spaces wherein one can discuss and debate things that are not, indeed, sometimes cannot, be discussed elsewhere.

I mean, at what other academic conference have you ever heard of a debate about the (de)merits of any aspect of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI)? With rare exceptions, it can’t be debated because everyone knows if you oppose any aspect of DEI within academia, you risk reputational damage, denunciation, and punishment. Instead, DEI has swept academia with little discussion or debate, via institutional capture by activists. This is great if you are with the activists; but, in general, adopting broadsweeping, even radical, changes to organizations and institutions without debate is, in my view, dysfunctional on its demerits, and possibly even a sign of creeping authoritarianism.

Thus, it is no coincidence that the only debate yet held about DEI (as far as I know — if I am wrong, please do let me know) at an academic conference was at the SOIBS conference. Below, therefore, I present an only slightly modified (for presentation in writing, with a little extra polish added, and also some additional backnforth that occurred after the debate):

The Great DEI Debate

The key question: Are the new mandatory DEI statements required by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) as a condition of presenting scientific research at their conference net beneficial or net harmful?

Debaters:

Speaking in favor of net beneficial: Anne Wilson, professor at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada) and a strong advocate for both social justice and academic freedom. I know some of you think this is not possible, but keep this in mind: If she wasn’t also an advocate for academic freedoms she would not have participated in this debate or even attended the SOIBS conference. You can find out more about her here.

Speaking in favor of net harmful: Me.

Some additional context. We did not actually work out this exact question before the debate though it was the question we mostly addressed. I took the opportunity of the debate to criticize DEI initiatives more broadly, including but not restricted to that of SPSP. I shared my talk with Anne before the debate, so she knew I would be doing this.

So, without any further ado, I present the debate.

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The Great DEI Debate

Anne Wilson, speaking in favor.

So I find myself here debating on the “pro” side of mandatory DEI. Which is odd in some ways, because I have misgivings about ‘mandatory’ anything, and plenty of critiques of DEI in some of its manifestations. So before I get to what I’m guessing are my big points of disagreement with Lee, I’ll acknowledge some likely agreements.

First, some DEI is just empty buzzwords and ineffectual bias trainings that we know largely don’t work at least on their own. Not so bad if not for the resources taken up and opportunity costs. Then there’s the administrator overreach – if any job search starts with admin teams grading diversity statements and rejecting candidates out of hand – you’ve taken a questionable idea and made it terrible. And there’s the ideological bullying and character assassination of anyone who dissents from the current correct view. Any movement will have its bullies, we’ll likely never avoid that – but unfortunately in some lefty circles this vice has been recast as a virtue.

So with those criticisms of DEI on the table to begin, why did I sign up in defense of DEI. Well, first because I think we still need it – that is, we don’t yet have equality of opportunity; plenty of talented people who work hard simply don’t get the chance to contribute and be rewarded according to their potential. At least part of this unfairness is still based on demographic and socioeconomic factors that should have no place in determining success. But I’d guess Lee and I might even agree on that.

So what are we disagreeing on?  

Well, to get local for a moment, the debate idea started when I told Lee how much I disagreed with his take on SPSP’s new DEI question- the question people were asked to answer with their conference submissions this year. And to his credit, instead of blowing me off, he invited me to debate it. Why do I think this DEI question is a reasonable addition to the conference submission?  First, I think a lot of relatively ineffective DEI focuses mainly on implicit bias. This is the kind of bias that can often be eliminated through blind review, like what is already done at SPSP. The problem is, blind review may fix that in-the-moment bias, but it can also obscure other – often more structural - considerations that are really worth considering in the pursuit of fairness and a broad understanding of merit. Blind review means that one kind of merit often rises to the top – it should be no surprise that teams of established, well-connected scholars with lots of resources from elite institutions will be submitting very strong conference proposals. Those traditional metrics of merit can be evaluated in blind review, and it’s the kind of merit that can sometimes replicate the status quo. But blind review can also cause us to miss other merit, the kind of proposal that is still rigorous, high-quality research but might get missed or under-valued if we don’t know more about the researchers and their context. If I know that a submission came from a primarily undergraduate institution, collected data from hard-to-reach populations, included a team of junior and underrepresented scholars it does tell me something additional that is worth amplifying and rewarding. And honestly, if it comes down to selecting one more great presentation by the usual established elite scholars, or giving a leg up to great work being done with understudied and underserved populations, ECRs at primarily undergrad institutions, first-gen scholars, and historically underrepresented minorities – I’m in. That’s what this DEI question seemed to me to be doing.

So - Lee Jussim and Jon Haidt quite loudly decried this new SPSP DEI initiative to their many followers, and in my view with a heaping spoonful of uncharitable spin. Definitely I agree there is some room for concern – it wasn’t transparent how the DEI information would be used, and “mandatory” can raise alarm bells (though in this case I see the mandatory question as fairly moot- I imagine the same concerns about ideological litmus tests could be raised even if it was not mandatory, because those who don’t answer are still conveying something). So these concerns were fair to raise. But I thought part of their critique was unfair.

At core, my criticism – and likely my disagreement with Lee - is about this. There are some bad DEI ideas out there. There are also a ton of people doing good, reasonable, evidence-based work informed by principles of fairness and merit. They’re addressing the pipeline, removing barriers, amplifying historically and currently underrepresented perspectives, and considering ways that cumulative disadvantage can obscure genuine merit using traditional metrics only. The expansive list of criteria SPSP provided suggested to me that they were taking seriously structural barriers and not just looking for ideological buzzwords.

(this is from the slide on SPSP’s criteria, not part of my comments directly)

• Explain whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP

• May include, but is not limited to:

• The research participants in the sample (non-WEIRD; underserved populations)

• Methods used in the research

• Members of the research team (e.g., background, diversity, career stage, affiliation type … underrepresented sociodemographic backgrounds, early career, from outside the United States, predominately undergraduate institutions, minority-serving institutions, or outside academia);

• Content of the presentation (e.g., critical theories, prejudice, equity, cross-cultural research).

So then we get to this place where there are two opposing, but both legitimate definitions of these DEI principles. It depends how you define it. This brings to mind the if-by-whiskey fallacy.

If by whiskey, you mean Knob Creek Limited Release rye, count me (Lee) in. I’d love to have Anne join me...

If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

--Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Jr. (1952)¹

And the DEI parallels:

• If by equity you mean equality of outcome, anti-merit – well sure I’m against it

• But if by equity you mean equality of opportunity, elimination of disproportionate barriers – sounds pretty ok

• And here’s the one that arose during the recent SPSP exchange – between Jon Haidt and Laura King

• If by antiracism you mean… “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”                   - Kendi (2019)

  (though even here – this quote plucked out of context misses part of Kendi’s more nuanced point)²

• But if by antiracism you mean “the policy or practice of opposing racism and promoting racial tolerance.”        - Oxford English Dictionary

You get the idea. In a nutshell, I think that people like Lee, and Jonathan Haidt, may have spent so much time sounding the alarm about the bad kinds of DEI (the over-reach, the illiberalism) – and I acknowledge (even when I disagree) that their dissent is a service to the field and comes at some personal cost -- that they’re prone to some confirmation bias, of applying the bad definition when the alternative definition is perfectly reasonable and the more charitable interpretation.  

Indeed, I have been noticing the heterodox crowd sometimes congratulate themselves for their free-thinking ways, yet their reactions to some issues can have a whiff of dogma – a knee jerk opposition to DEI initiatives based on the assumption – sometimes made without evidence or much curiosity - that they’re going to be the bad stuff.³ This may be a valid reaction sometimes, but it really risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It can also result in some real misunderstandings between proponents and opponents of a program. The supporters of a DEI question like this would tell you they’re motivated by fairness, equal opportunity, and merit – and they assume the opponents are against that stuff. The opponents will also say are motivated by fairness, equal opportunity and merit – and assume the supporters have tossed each of those principles out the window. What do we do with that? Well, one thing is to slow down on imputing motives. You hear someone mention equity or antiracism – don’t immediately assume Harrison Bergeron or Kendi.***

The bummer to me is that in this dispute, all the actual common ground on principles gets lost in the mix. If we’re just enjoying a never-ending culture war, then great, we can keep on going as we have. And if we think status quo is just fine, then sure, we can reject all attempts otherwise. But if we do agree on some principles of fairness, merit, equal opportunity and we just keep talking past each other, then we miss the chance to agree on the goal and reject some tactics – and work to replace those with better ones.

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That ended her actual opening comments, but please see footnotes 2 and 3 for further comments. She also requested a chance to reply to some of my additional thoughts that appear after the text of my actual presentation (if I get to add stuff, Anne getting to do so is only fair).

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Me, Speaking in Opposition

Delighted to be here and thanks to Anne for having the courage to enter this lion’s den.⁴

DEI in general, as actually implemented, is somewhere between a useless boondoggle and a complete disaster. Major universities now have scores of DEI bureaucrats, often costing $5-10m/year or more. Imagine what that money could be put toward: faculty, buildings, fellowships for meritorious low SES students (which will be disproportionately nonwhite without race-based policies).

DEI is regularly instituted without evidence that larger DEI bureaucracies produce more diverse students or faculty.  Its almost like an article of faith in progressive circles, a religious dogma without supernatural gods.

Early data: U’s with small DEI bureaucracies have more satisfied students as per the now ubiquitous climate surveys than those with large DEI bureaucracies. This is a preliminary study and should not be taken as ALL ENCOMPASSING SCIENTIFIC TRUTH but its in the wrong direction for DEI advocates.

Sign seen at the NYC March for Science. Academics loved “evidence based” things when they could wield it as cudgel against Trump. But require it for DEI?

DEI around the country threatens academic freedom:

• Dorian Abbot’s talk on exoplanets was deplatformed because he had recently written an op ed for Newsweek opposing it

• Biologist Carol Hooven was driven from the Harvard Biology Department by a hostile work environment instigated by a grad student DEI committee member (I think she was the chair of the committee; if wrong, I will correct this), who denounced Hooven on Twitter for saying sex is binary

• Gordon Klein, suspended, now suing UCLA. He informed a student he was not going to grade Black students more generously in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, the student went to the DEI office, and Klein got suspended.

• Explicit calls for censorship (Princeton), and “imposing values” in the name of DEI, including at Nature.

University officials routinely declare they are not political litmus tests, yet the use of DEI statements as a screening device for hiring is on the rise.  Texas Tech recently abandoned mandatory statements after John Sailer used FOIA requests to obtain hiring records which showed they were being used as political litmus tests.  Berkeley used DEI statements as an initial screen to eliminate almost ¾ of over 800 faculty job candidates. 

Nothing quite says “We are using DEI as an ideological values litmus test” as Berkeley’s rubric for scoring DEI statements which explicitly states: “Discusses diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values that every faculty member should actively contribute to advancing.”

Here is a legitimate view about DEI precluded by how DEI statements are used — anyone who wrote this would be immediately excluded from consideration:

• “DEI IS A COUNTERPRODUCTIVE WASTE OF RESOURCES.” This is a viewpoint. Whether DEI is good or bad is an opinion; one might bring facts to bear on it, but whether it is net good or bad is still an opinion. Rejecting those who hold it constitutes viewpoint discrimination. That expression of such a viewpoint would be exclusionary shows how demands to conform to progressive views of diversity is a form of compelled speech or censorship (for those who refuse to comply). It violates academic freedom.

  

FORTHCOMING FIRE Survey (now available):

• 75% of liberal faculty endorse DEI statements

• 90% of conservative faculty oppose them

Tell me again how this is not a political litmus test?

Jon Haidt, Laura King (past President of SPSP under whose leadership the mandatory DEI statement policy was adopted) & I had an informative exchange on these issues.

“These are consciousness raising tools.” — from Laura King. Nothing quite says “progressive political activism” as consciousness raising. DEI is part of a political movement plain and simple.

There are lots of causes out there that lots of people believe to be good ones. Environmentalism.  Ukraine. Patriotism. Anti-communism. Homelessness. Drug abuse. Anti-racism. 

SPSP should not be in the business of compelling political activism of any type, including against what its leadership and gatekeepers believe to be racism.

Other Disingenuous statements:

“It is absolutely possible for someone to argue that a presentation represents needed ideological diversity”— Laura King.   This is literally true, I am sure, but no one cares that it is possible. Given that SPSP leadership’s demeanor to ideological diversity has ranged from callous indifference to sneering dismissal, forgive me for not wanting to waste my time writing such a DEI statement.

“Moreover, certainly, one can state that a particular submission does not serve these goals or that the work is irrelevant to them “ — Laura King. Of course its literally true that “one can state” these things.  Given the history of how these things have been used, forgive me for believing this is another exercise in futility.

And seriously, does anyone think this DEI statement would benefit a proposal:

“It is the anti-racist policy of my lab to judge people entirely on their merits.  Students are admitted to the lab based entirely on their achievements and qualifications, regardless of their racial or other demographic backgrounds. This is transcendantally anti-racist because it makes no important decisions based on race, and focuses like a laser on people's actual or potential contributions.  It treats people as individuals, not as category symbols.” 

[I then ended my comments with quotes, first from some major court decisions and second from dissident scholars of color]. 

SCOTUS

Sweezey v. New Hampshire

"[t]he essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident…. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation”

My son, Josh, after we hiked up a 14,000 foot Colorado mountain, Quandary Peak

Keyishian vs. Board of Regents

academic freedom "is a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette

No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Here are some quotes included in my denounced paper.  How do you think they would fare at SPSP if pointed out that I “center” the perspectives of people of color by quoting them there:

Wilfred Reilly (2021, political science): “…people of color are successful in modern America to an almost surprising degree…As of 2019, seven of the top 10 American ethnic groups in income terms—Indian, Taiwanese, Filipino, Indonesian, Persian, and Arab Lebanese Americans—were “people of color” as this term is generally conceptualized…”

George Yancey (sociology, quoted in Kristof, 2016): ““Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me [Kristof]. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

Musa al-Gharbi (2020, sociology): “Diversity is important. Diversity-related training is terrible.”

Amna Khalid (2022, history): “Having grown up under a military dictatorship in Pakistan, I know well what happens when freedom of expression is threatened and people are bullied into silence. It pains me deeply to see this happening in my adopted country.”

Sarah Haider (2022, Founder, ex-Muslims of North America): “The activist game, to sum in one sentence, is about results… The thinker game is about truth… Years ago I was asked on a podcast whether it was possible to be effective and intellectually honest in the activist space. I said no.”

Bottom Lines:

Mandatory DEI statements are the conjoined twins of political oppression:

1. Censorship. People who refuse to provide them or who do not subscribe to the right progressive values are censored out of jobs or out of the conference.

2.  Compelled speech. SPSP is one of our main professional orgs, and presenting there is valuable for many people’s professional advancement. Even people who oppose DEI and affirmative action will then be compelled to say they support them, in order to be allowed into the room.

SPSP’s leadership is infused with left authoritarian activists:

People who signed the open letter calling for Fiedler’s firing without a hearing, who lauded it when he was fired without a hearing, and who denounced five of us as racists without reading the papers supposedly manifesting said racism (which were not available), and calling for all of our papers to be censored, ie, retracted, at PoPS.

I’ll highlight just one: Alison Ledgerwood, the first signatory and I’d guess drafter of the open letter of demonization & denunciation and call for censorship -- recipient of an SPSP service award for … get this, her efforts to advance constructive scientific discourse in the field.

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Lee’s Addendum:

That ended my main presentation. Afterward, there was some backnforth both live at the conference, but also informally.⁵ So I add some of that here:

I LOVE that Anne is committed to equal opportunity and merit. So am I and so are, I believe, something like 90% of Americans. One needs no statement of fealty to progressive values to institute such a commitment. However, if there was a hint that any DEI program anywhere would accept my statement above that begins “It is the anti-racist policy of my lab to judge people entirely on their merits…” I’d reconsider my opposition to that program. 

I repeat one of Anne’s points here because I agree with most of it yet still reject DEI statements, and explain why after re-presenting her quote in full:

• it should be no surprise that teams of established, well-connected scholars with lots of resources from elite institutions will be submitting very strong conference proposals. Those traditional metrics of merit can be evaluated in blind review, and it’s the kind of merit that can sometimes replicate the status quo. But blind review can also cause us to miss other merit, the kind of proposal that is still rigorous, high-quality research but might get missed or under-valued if we don’t know more about the researchers and their context. If I know that a submission came from a primarily undergraduate institution, collected data from hard-to-reach populations, included a team of junior and underrepresented scholars it does tell me something additional that is worth amplifying and rewarding. And honestly, if it comes down to selecting one more great presentation by the usual established elite scholars, or giving a leg up to great work being done with understudied and underserved populations, ECRs (early career researchers) at primarily undergrad institutions, first-gen scholars, and historically underrepresented minorities – I’m in. That’s what this DEI question seemed to me to be doing.

Anne’s point about the advantages of well-connected scholars at prestigious institutions is a dead-on bullseye — its one reason I have disliked the big conferences long before all this culture war nonsense. But one needs no mandatory DEI statements to ensure representation of scholars from less prestigious institutions. All that SPSP needs do is … just do it.

The Egyptians did not make us write DEI statements to go up in their balloons. We just did it (after paying, but, Hell, it was only $60, and the flight was amazing).

In a side conversation, Anne said that SPSP uses blind review, so reviewers do not even know the institution of the scholars behind any proposed presentation. But this is irrelevant. SPSP’s selection committee can still factor this in after blind review, if it so chooses. I’d support them doing so to some degree. NSF has long had a policy of distributing its graduate fellowships across institutions, so that Stanford, the Ivies, Michigan, UCLA and the like don’t suck up all the fellowships. Good policy, in my opinion; no DEI statements were required for decades (I do not know whether they now require them). Same principle applies to presentations by graduate or undergraduate students or junior scholars. If SPSP wishes to highlight them, give them a boost in selection, that’s fine with me; no DEI statements required.

Anne also mentioned work on hard-to-reach populations. Just because a population is hard to reach does not automatically make the work meritorious. However, if high quality research makes some sort of unique contribution by virtue of studying hard-to-reach populations, this should be obvious from the submitted research proposal which presumably informs the selection committee about the unique sample it studied — No DEI statement required.

Note, however, that Anne’s comments also referred to scholars from underrepresented groups. I am semi-fine using this as a tiebreaker. Here is something I could, possibly, endorse. If, after blind review on the scientific merits, some proposal including scholars from underrepresented groups is rated identically to another without such scholars, I think I could support this. The cost to individuals from well-represented groups would be modest and the value of doing something-as-opposed-to-nothing to redress historical injustices, perhaps, warrants that cost.

I am, however, ambivalent even here for several reasons.

1. It still constitutes discrimination based on race, ethnicity, etc., and there are good reasons to consider that immoral. Although diversity was permitted by SCOTUS to be one component of college admissions, this is not college admissions; discrimination is illegal as per U.S. civil righs law and even use of diversity in admissions may well be on the chopping block for the current SCOTUS

2. The corrosive effects on the wider society of institutional endorsement of any type of racial/ethnic discrimination are rarely worth their benefits

3. We now have decades of historical record showing that, once diversity advocates get their foot in the door with some modest steps, such as using diversity as a tiebreaker, they have (and therefore, I believe they would in the future) come up with “justifications” to expand its use way beyond mere tiebreaking.

4. In between “treating people exactly the same” and “preferential selection” there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of space for acknowledging the obstacles faced by people who come from difficult life circumstances. Anne’s quoting of Kendi quoting Justice Blackmun about “taking account of race” can mean many many many things, without meaning “preferential selection” (e.g., outreach and mentoring programs, to name just two).

5. Conservatives are the most underrepresented group in the social sciences, and if any diversity advocate was serious about “underrepresentation” as a problem in any sense other than a far left, progressive one, they would be taking pro-active steps to do something about this (not instead of redressing other forms of underrepresentation but in addition; and, again, “taking pro-active steps” can mean lots of things besides preferential selection, which, for political identities/ideologies, I oppose). That they do not, to me, testifies to the ideological and disingenuous nature of diversity rhetoric in academia.

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Anne’s Addendum

Alison Ledgerwood's SPSP award almost 6 years ago in 2017 was (IMO) deserved, and has nothing to do with her more recent actions with regard to the Fiedler letter. During the early years of the replication crisis, I considered Alison a truly constructive force in the discourse - she moved past the nastiness online (this was when the accusations of "data police" and "bullying" were at their height and starting to repel people from an otherwise very important issue for psychological science) and focused on making science better. Alison was a big force in moving away from personal accusation and toward best practices - I considered her a model of how to navigate the core issues of better science without getting caught up in the drama. I believe her award reflected these actions, and I think it's misleading to conflate the award with her more recent actions. Your phrasing may suggest to people (incorrectly) that SPSP is rewarding Alison for her role in calling for Fiedler's dismissal and calling it constructive.

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Final Comments

I confess to being quite proud of this event. Stepping back from the substance of the arguments, this is the type of open, deliberative process I thought I was going into when I entered academia in 1981. I am grateful to Anne, who, given the state of academia, was not merely courageous for engaging on my home turf (see fn 2), but for accepting the reputational risks of being associated with anyone who stands for free and open inquiry including (especially?) me, which, in academia, is routinely confused with racism, White supremacy and far right extremism.

Christian Crandall, former President of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), is one of the signatories to the open letter demonizing some of us as racists and calling to censor our papers without having read them. Note free speech in scare quotes in the first line of the abstract. This combination of confounding free speech with racism, and then demonizing and seeking to censor those one opposes, does an excellent job of representing how much of academia rolls now. For those interested in the general topic, see Tolerance for the Free Speech of Outgroup Partisans, which found that Republicans more strongly support free speech than do Democrats, even for speech by those they oppose.

I am also proud of the event for several additional reasons:

• It attests to the value added to academic and societal discourse by SOIBS. SOIBS was founded, in large part, to open up academic and social science discourse around topics and viewpoints that have been effectively suppressed. Although rightwing politicians and intellectuals outside of academia have long criticized DEI, the campaign of punishment and ostracism that DEI proponents have unleashed on opponents within academia had, before this event, effectively silenced most expressions of dissent (go here, here, here, here, or here for examples and evidence). To paraphrase Legally Blonde, SPSP did not open up this debate; APS did not do it, APA did not do it. We Did It!

• The debate modeled how to discuss these issues not just civilly but with openness and genuine respect for one another’s views. I have a bad attitude toward diktats imposed from on high, but a very positive attitude toward events like this, even if many believe Anne had the better arguments. I am not sure I “lost” but losing in a fair and open debate beats winning by diktat in my world (see My Positionality Statement for more along these lines).

• With no false praise for Anne, I think she did an excellent job presenting a strong case for the use of DEI statements and DEI more broadly. I hope I did one as well for why I disagree.

Footnotes

1. Lee writing here. The If by Whiskey Fallacy is one of my favorite fallacies of all time, even though its not an actual logical fallacy. Its more like a person talking out of both sides of their mouth. It is also worth noting that what is quoted there is from an actual political speech by the actual Noah “Soggy” Sweat Jr, his real name. I do not know whether he won the election.

2. Anne writing here: The quote that everyone circulates from Kendi is always shared out of context. He uses the term “discrimination” in part because he’s discussing how opponents of affirmative action have come to frame it. And whether one agrees or disagrees, the couple of lines added below do provide a more nuanced view of affirmative action as a principle arguably aligned with justice and fairness, not opposed to it:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.”

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/06/ibram-x-kendi-definition-of-antiracist

3. Anne: An example of "heterodox knee-jerk closed mindedness from the free-thinkers” comes from Haidt’s footnote 4, in which he acknowledges that Laura King indicated that SPSP didn’t endorse Kendi’s definition per se and provided a definition that she saw as aligned with the committee’s working definition. She even updated the website to communicate this definition. This could have been a win for Haidt. He raised a concern, she answered it and even clarified it publicly. Instead, Haidt acknowledged that King did respond, but that he still just doesn’t believe her (for what seemed to me to be rather pedantic reasons about wording and timing) and has opted to cling to his original beliefs. This doesn’t seem to extend and the charity or benefit of the doubt Haidt usually endorses.

4. Lee: I should have opened with “mule’s den.” Go here to find out why.

5. Lee: The debate was held before a live audience of about 40-50 people. There was also considerable backnforth with the audience. Several told me variations on them being disappointed that we agreed as much as we did and that there weren’t more fireworks. Perhaps they were expecting a redo of Haidt’s and my exchange with Laura King, which was pretty stark. But the difference was that King oversaw the imposition of the DEI mandates from On High, without public debate and without any formal consultation of the SPSP membership (e.g., a vote), whereas Anne courageously walked into a debate with me on what could be considered my “home” field, in that SOIBS was an organization I founded; the difference between Anne and Laura is quite stark. Along similar lines, Anne did not sign the open letter denouncing Fiedler and calling for the censorship (removal) of the five papers he accepted whereas King did. I will soon be posting a paper here at Unsafe Science titled The New Bookburners, about the rise of authoritarian behavior among the academic left, including a variety of successful efforts by academic outrage mobs to retract papers that passed peer review because they found them offensive (racist, transphobic, pro-colonialism), including King’s call to censor our accepted papers. This behavior, I think, more than vindicates my distrust and “uncharitable” reading of her stated rationales for supporting SPSP’s DEI mandate — I mean, its only uncharitable if its wrong.