An article in the New York Times by Nicholas Confessore about the struggles to implement DEI at the University of Michigan offered a rather stunning review of how superficially appealing notions like DEI have unintended consequences.
What went wrong at Michigan? One answer is that programs like Michigan’s are confused about whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. The earliest versions were aimed at integrating Black students who began arriving on college campuses in larger numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. But in subsequent decades, as the Supreme Court whittled down the permissible scope of affirmative action programs, what began as a tool for racial justice turned into a program of educational enrichment: A core principle of D.E.I. now is that all students learn better in diverse environs.
That leaves D.E.I. programs less focused on the people they were originally conceived to help — and conflicted about what they are really trying to achieve. Schools like Michigan pay lip service to religious or political diversity, for example, but may do little to advance those goals. Along the way, they make ambitious commitments to racial diversity that prove difficult to achieve. As a result, many Black students at Michigan have grown cynical about the school’s promises and feel that D.E.I. has forgotten them.
Earlier in the article, the author points to something that struck me is at the core of much of society today. Perhaps the DEI efforts have increased tensions rather than seeking understanding. Some of that change reflects a growing willingness to challenge ugly behavior that might once have been tolerated. But people at Michigan also argued that the school’s D.E.I. efforts had fostered a culture of grievance. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students said, were cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding administrative intervention.
We must lower the temperature of our conversations. There is way too much violence on campus and in our communities. It seems that DEI has increased these temperatures rather than lowering them.
I decided to dig a bit deeper and learned that a culture of grievance has been published in the paper on Microaggression and Moral Cultures by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning published January 30,2014. Here is a summary:
Campus activists and others might refer to slights of one’s ethnicity or other cultural characteristics as “microaggressions,” and they might use various forums to publicize them. Here we examine this phenomenon by drawing from Donald Black’s theories of conflict and from cross-cultural studies of conflict and morality. We argue that this behavior resembles other conflict tactics in which the aggrieved actively seek the support of third parties as well as those that focus on oppression. We identify the social conditions associated with each feature, and we discuss how the rise of these conditions has led to large-scale moral change such as the emergence of a victimhood culture that is distinct from the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past.
Victimhood vs. honor and dignity. Boy those labels sound right in this context, so let’s look at each of them to see if we have more proof or clues to where the truth does lie. So, with almost no effort I found this wonderful article: Honor, Dignity, Victim: A Tale of Three Moral Cultures by Kevin McCaffree with this summary:
“In contrast to honor cultures that expect victims to be strong and stern enough to defend themselves, and dignity cultures that expect victims to be calm and charitable when in a dispute or disagreement, victim cultures emphasize how complainants are emotionally or physically fragile, vulnerable, and weak. In order to have high status in a victim culture, one must perfect and dramatize a personal “narrative of suffering.” Confidently espousing one’s own weakness, frailty, and suffering might seem, perhaps, dishonorable or shameful from an honor culture perspective, or gratuitous and self-absorbed from a dignity culture perspective.”
Why aren’t we having this conversation more generally? Are we so driven by an ideologically liberal mindset that honor and dignity have been deemed wrong?
Seems so to me.
