David Pan: DEI programs contribute to bigotry at the University of California

Stating that “there is no place for hate, bigotry, or intimidation at the University of California,” the University of California announced last week that it is setting aside $7 million to fight campus extremism, with $2 million going “to train UC leadership, staff, and faculty with an emphasis on freedom of expression; academic freedom; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.” 

But if bigotry is about prejudice against a person based on membership in a particular group, then the UC’s current diversity, equity, and inclusion policies would have to be described as themselves contributing to a form of bigotry. They target certain groups by race, ethnicity, and gender in order to provide them with special resources and preferences in admissions and hiring. For example, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program website states that it “was established in 1984 to encourage outstanding women and minority Ph.D. recipients to pursue academic careers at the University of California.” 

By explicitly directing fellowships toward women and certain minorities, this policy excludes individuals, notably white males and Asians, purely based on their race. Such university practices are modeling the type of decisions based on membership in a group that the University of California is now shocked to find has been proliferating amongst its students.

At the heart of the problem is the way in which the UC has institutionalized a focus on “under-represented minorities” to promote diversity. The theory is that if the percentage of a racial group such as Blacks amongst students or faculty is lower than the percentage in the general population, then that is proof of discrimination and therefore that preferences are justified. But the idea that “under-representation” is evidence of discrimination is a fallacy. To illustrate, we know that there is a higher proportion of Asians at the University of California than in the general population. But it does not make sense to conclude that, for instance, whites are being discriminated against because they are “under-represented” in relation to Asians. The term “under-represented” minority is built on a fallacy, and we need to stop using that term when what we really mean is Blacks and Hispanics.

But even if there were discrimination, the right response is not to create more discrimination the other way. In practice, preferences for certain groups lead to discrimination against “over-represented” groups such as whites or Asians. Such micro-managing of racial distributions even extends down to particular fields, in which the UC deems engineering in special need of help to boost the number of Black and Hispanic students, but regards ethnic studies as less urgent because there is an “over-representation” of Black and Hispanic people. If the logic were being applied consistently, then there would also be a push to bring more whites into ethnic studies fields. The fact that this does not happen points to both the absurdity of the entire approach as well as the hypocrisy in applying it. 

The example of ethnic studies demonstrates that there are plenty of reasons for “under-representation” of certain groups in certain fields that have nothing to do with discrimination, and it makes no sense to try and engineer such statistical outcomes. Even if applied consistently, such a policy of racial balancing, in shifting attention to someone’s group membership and away from their individual actions and achievements, reinforces racial prejudice by categorizing people in terms of race. But the way that the policy is selectively applied makes it much more consistently racist. The UC does not treat “over-representation” of Black and Hispanic people in ethnic studies as a problem but does see “over-representation” of whites and Asians in engineering as a problem.

To add insult to injury, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are not even very effective at helping the generally less wealthy people they are meant to help. Right now, applicant pools don’t include as many Black and Hispanic people as in the general population. While it might be comforting to try and give the ones who are in that pool preferences for admissions to college and jobs, it is clearly unfair to others and it only helps those few people. But the underlying problem is that there are relatively few Black and Hispanic people in the applicant pool in the first place. The real solutions would have to address the problems at the level of elementary schools and middle schools, not at the level of college admissions.  

While the focus on diversity at colleges may be well intentioned, such policies are not only harmful in the way that they promote bigotry. They also divert our attention from the real source of our problems in failing primary and secondary schools. To be serious about improving the percentage of Black and Hispanic students at universities, we would need policies such as school choice to give parents the ability to take their children out of failing schools and find better ones for them. 

But instead of taking on the teachers’ unions to establish competition for public schools through school vouchers,

DEI advocates prefer to double down on their failing and counterproductive policies.

 

In the end, though, it is not the administrators who are leading us astray. They are simply carrying out the policies established by the UC Regents, who are appointed by the governor. We voters are the ones who must take responsibility to vote into office the representatives who are willing to work on real solutions rather than participating in diversity virtue signaling.

David Pan is a professor at UC Irvine, the editor of Telos (telospress.com), and a candidate for Congress in California’s 46th district.