Multiplicity and Belonging instead of Affirmative Action and DEI (guest post)
“It is time to replace the ideas behind affirmative action and DEI programs in higher education with more progressive concepts that better describe current social reality.”
So begins the following guest post by Naomi Zack, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York (Lehman College).
The post is based on the first chapter of her new book, Multiplicity, Belonging, and Free Speech in US Higher Education: Thriving through Current Crises (Rowman and Littlefield) soon available open access, with a free pdf now posted here.
Multiplicity and Belonging instead of Affirmative Action and DEI
by Naomi Zack
It is time to replace the ideas behind affirmative action and DEI programs in higher education with more progressive concepts that better describe current social reality.
Affirmative action has never been popular because dominant racial, ethnic, and gender groups have believed it unfair to them. In 2023, the US Supreme Court supported that perspective in striking down affirmative action admissions criteria for colleges and universities. The Court thereby ended the validity of an approach to ‘diversity’ whereby, since the late 1970s, colleges and universities were permitted to give some special treatment to minorities, not to benefit or affirm them—that is, the action was affirmative but not its motive—but to benefit whole units of which they would be parts: the university community. However, the racial and ethnic minority groups previously subjects for both affirmative action and diversity mirrored US census categories of four nonwhite races and one ethnicity (Hispanic/Latino), a taxonomy that has been rejected by the human biological and social sciences since about the mid-20th century.
The social construction of race and ethnicity has never done justice to how members of designated groups identify themselves and experience social disadvantage. There are not only greater biological “racial” differences within any one erstwhile racial group than between any two of them, but there are hundreds of ethnicities variably based on appearance, national origin, religion, traditions, and so forth.
The absence of scientific foundations for the census categories motivates a conceptual move to multiplicities. College admissions should now be based on varied applicant experiences and not the narrow criterion that the Court termed “the color of their skin.” Indeed, the Court allowed for identifying ‘character,’ as based on experience in application essays, little realizing that differences in experiences are the only valid differences in what used to be considered race, ethnicity, and diversity identities. Multiplicities also include gender distinctions, because that binary system has been destabilized; income and immigration status are other factors.
Multiplicities are already in most applicant pools and attention to special racial, ethnic, or gender identities are not necessary to achieve social progress as represented by student bodies. After students enroll, they can decide for themselves what identities they want to assert or emphasize, with support from their institutions in resources that are fairly distributed without discrimination. One exception that requires preparation before admission is disability, because ADA compliance is mandatory for all who need it, and accommodation requires physical construction.
But overall, both elite and public institutions can focus on applicants’ accounts of their experience. Viewed through the lens of outdated minority categories or the frame of identity politics, the variations in individual experience may seem determined, prescribed, or distorted by race, ethnicity, or gender. But the point of a focus on individual experience is that many factors other than these identities (as broadly construed by census categories) can cause unpredictably varied experience.
In changing how admissions categories are broadly recognized, DEI should also change. Gone would be diversity for the sake of a majoritarian whole. Equity based on outdated racial, ethnic, or gender categories would no longer be necessary. Inclusion should be rethought to center on the belonging of new admittees instead of their incorporation into pre-existing majoritarian-dominant groups and communities.
Implementation of these new ideas would require that those in higher education who forge policy and programs pay more attention to contemporary academic scholarship in science and the humanities. The education of the electorate that political philosophers have long called for to support democracy would thus begin within academic leadership.
One very narrow point about the above: ‘more progressive’ has, as far as I can tell, no clear meaning. Up until recently, many around me strenuously argued that it was ‘more progressive’ to view “variations in individual experience” as “determined, prescribed, or distorted by race, ethnicity, or gender”, and that to observe that “many factors other than these identities” can cause unpredictably varied experience” was ‘less progressive’ (indeed, some variety of -ist). I’m skeptical that there is a meaningful answer to the question of whether that view or Zack’s is the ‘progressive’ one.
(But none of that is to take a stand on the merit of her proposal(s).)
Yeah, I wouldn’t know what to think, if this were, indeed, all along, the progressive view. I wouldn’t know what to make of the droves of soi-disant progressive allies claiming, or at least assuming, that variations of experience are importantly, substantively determined by skin-color and the like.
Since skin color and false ideas of race associated with it are triggers for injustice and bad behavior and not the causes of it, we need a better way of identifying racialized people who are oppressed than by their skin color or “race.” I think this is where their differences experience is relevant.
I don’t see the dichotomy between claiming that some experiences are (sometimes significantly) shaped by one’s race/gender, and also claiming that many other factors also (sometimes significantly) shape experience. It strikes me as near trivial that both are true, and simultaneously so. Nobody, I suppose, would seriously deny that some experience is socially mediated and that race/gender are significant social categories; neither that there are many further factors.
If the “up until recently progressive” position is supposed to be that race/gender are always the only significant factors shaping experience, I think this not something anyone serious ever claimed (I can’t make promises about the dregs of social media, of course).
The “some variety of -ist” accusations are, rather, wont to come up when it is denied that race/gender is *ever* a factor, or when it is attempted to explain a case where race/gender was a factor by going on a wild goose chase for any other possible factor. I’m pretty sure this has not changed.
Hi Julian,
*In my experience*, claims beginning with ‘nobody would say’ or ‘nobody is saying’ are almost never true. For any position of increasing implausibility to the point of infinity, my experience has been that there is someone, somewhere, who says it, and says it seriously (unless ‘seriousness’ is already stipulatively indexed to plausibility, defendability, etc.). Indeed, though I am no social scientist, I suspect there is an extent to which the curve of people endorsing variations on a given position is actually somewhat U-shaped: lots of people endorsing the most plausible version; a big drop-off as plausibility decreases; then an increase again in the number of proponents as plausibility drops even further but, correspondingly, simplicity and apparent ‘moral clarity’ or ‘radicality’ go up.
In any case, my (no doubt highly socially mediated!) experience is that I, personally, have met many, many people who strenuously, and with apparent seriousness, deny that “there are many further factors” mediating any given person’s experience beyond race and gender and perhaps a few others, and equally strenuously and seriously insist that claiming otherwise is racist, sexist, etc. But your mileage may vary!
I find it rather disingenuous to defend this shift as a more “progressive” approach when in general, universities are rebranding toward “inclusion and belonging” because right-wing forces are systematically suppressing all mentions of race and gender, at least at public institutions, and have managed to turn “DEI” into a political smear.
Perhaps we could reimagine admissions to be so “inclusive” that crude measures like racial identification wouldn’t be necessary per se, but I don’t see how it is possible in the face of these kind of conservative headwinds. Doing so would require more nuanced thinking about how forces like race (and gender, ability etc) play out in individual lives, while the new guidelines bar us from asking or thinking about this at all. Institutions that are undergoing this kind of forced retooling are generally also becoming less inclusive toward trans students and sexual assault survivors, for example, and often show a marked decrease in racial diversity (as measured by the good old census categories).
Not disingenuous b/c I’ve been interrogating identities based on race for decades and wrote this book before the 2024 election. Affirmative Action and DEI are weak ideas for liberation. AA is narrowly based on false taxonomy and DEI is condescending, esp. in the assumption that what newcomers are being included in is worthy without them. That racists and other ignorant people have attacked these ideas and methods is not in itself good reason to defend and preserve them.
Thank you for such a crisp and interesting post.
(1) One group of objections to DEI initiatives focuses on the monstrous bureaucratic apparatus such initiatives tend to motivate and rationalize. Within this group, there will be those who worry about the quantity of resources devoted to such initiatives, at the expense of more obviously educational ones, given the growing evidence of DEI’s ineffectiveness at meeting the goals that are its self-proclaimed raison d’être. There will also be those who cite the narcissism (in the strict sense, explored by Rieff and Lasch, among others) engendered in students when they know a battalion of professional functionaries exists simply to “support” them while they “assert” and “emphasize” their self-identity.
This group of objections does not arise from “dominant racial, ethnic, and gender groups” who “have believed [affirmative action and DEI programs] unfair to them.” Indeed, this group of objections is not primarily concerned with who gets in to the institution, for what purpose, and with what right. It is concerned, rather, with what (de)formations of student subjectivity and agency the institution is responsible for.
The problem, according to this group of objections, has never been with diversity or multiplicity per se. It has been with the expensive, ineffective, disempowering, overreactions thought to be necessary for its cultivation.
(2) Not unrelatedly, I’m skeptical that a newly construed attention on experience, as described here:
would temper the widespread tendency of prospective students to organize their self-conceptions according to the master concepts of trauma and disadvantage and to think, quite reasonably, of the competition to be granted entrance to the “best” schools as a competition to be the most boutiquely victimized.
Here, too, the problem has never been with diversity or multiplicity per se. It’s been with that which a diversity or multiplicity of is so strenuously orchestrated and incentivized.
The multiplicities are present in applicant pools for most institutions. Just let applicants know that talent and achievement are what will count. But the elite schools making up less than 1 percent of all college students do have a problem now without AA.
It is indeed time for a change — but a real one. Stand FRM (Freedom, Rigor, and Merit): https://youtube.com/shorts/AsD7c8Mp41w?feature=shared
This is a small point, but I wanted to push back on claim made early on in this post:
But it is not just “dominant groups” who have had doubts about affirmative action. Even most Black Americans (52% per Gallup) say its demise is “mostly a good thing,” a surprising finding mostly driven by a shift in young people’s views.
While it might be peripheral to the thrust of the post, your “small point” is an important point. It challenges the story many progressives recite in the face of reasoned objections to what strikes many as an undemocratic managerialism.
The reasons people give for objecting to affirmative action also go beyond that it is unfair. It is commonly believed that affirmative action leads to bad hires. For instance, Fox has been trying to blame affirmative action for the extent of harm caused by the California fires.
One should also take note of black intellectuals who have been critical of affirmative action, such as John McWhorter, Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes. Of these only Loury is a conservative. Their arguments seem to have had much influence on the public, or at least the well-educated public. And their point is not that affirmative action is “unfair to dominant groups”.
Both “dominant groups vs minorities” and “right-wing forces versus progressives” are tribalist narratives which, fortunately, are losing their appeal as well.
I would go even further than this. OP says “dominant…groups have believed it unfair”, but it surely sometimes just is unfair, quite independently of someone’s belief. Please see: discrimination against Asian applicants at Harvard.
I’m puzzled. The second-to-last paragraph suggests that we should foster multiplicity, not for the sake of benefiting students collectively or treating individuals equitably, but for the sake of belonging. What is meant by “belonging” here? And why should we think that fostering multiplicity (i.e., admitting students with many different kinds of experiences) will lead to belonging?
On a different note: I’m pretty sure that, by “character,” SCOTUS meant virtue. The idea is that universities may consider ways in which applicants have responded virtuously to hardship. The idea is not that universities may sort applicants by income or immigration status with the aim of fostering multiplicity. (I’m no lawyer, though, so perhaps I’m wrong about that.)
Alex, belonging is meant to replace inclusion (in groups traditionally dominated).
Good distinction between experience of racism and accounts of character/grit/courage that is closer to Roberts’s implication. But someone writing about their experience of racism, could, I think, demonstrate virtue in overcoming it. The question is whether whenever someone writes about their experience of racism they are exhibiting virtue. Interesting question . . .
As I understand it, there is nothing in the Roberts majority opinion that prohibits universities from making special efforts to recruit — and giving some thumb-on-the-scale preference to — students from low-income or socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The Roberts opinion rules out race-based affirmative action in admissions. It says nothing about income-based affirmative action in admissions, or geography-based affirmative action in admissions, etc.
Hi Naomi, I would be grateful for some clarification of your position. In your closing remarks of the essay above, you write:
“In changing how admissions categories are broadly recognized, DEI should also change. Gone would be diversity for the sake of a majoritarian whole. Equity based on outdated racial, ethnic, or gender categories would no longer be necessary. Inclusion should be rethought to center on the belonging of new admittees instead of their incorporation into pre-existing majoritarian-dominant groups and communities.
Implementation of these new ideas would require that those in higher education who forge policy and programs pay more attention to contemporary academic scholarship in science and the humanities. The education of the electorate that political philosophers have long called for to support democracy would thus begin within academic leadership.”
And in your response to Sabrina Hom (above), you write:
“Affirmative Action and DEI are weak ideas for liberation. AA is narrowly based on false taxonomy and DEI is condescending, esp. in the assumption that what newcomers are being included in is worthy without them. That racists and other ignorant people have attacked these ideas and methods is not in itself good reason to defend and preserve them.”
However, the CUNY Graduate Center Philosophy Program lists you as a faculty member of its “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee” whose mission statement and rationale (posted here: Diversity Initiatives | CUNY Graduate Center) seem to run counter to the position you articulate in the essay.
Have you revised your position since the committee was established in 2021? Do you think your current position is compatible with the statement of the committee? If so, would you please explain how you regard it as compatible? Should the webpage be updated?
Good question, Shelley, about what to do when one is part of a structure that one believes is based on a flawed description of the world. This “IDEA” committee is, like many others throughout academia—well meaning but upon reflection, ill conceived. If my ideas are widely discussed and understood it would be feasible to work toward changes. So, yes, the website should be updated but right now, I cannot wave a wand and do that. The book is now theoretical, not blueprints for action that enough people understand the need for. The new US administration is attacking DEI for the wrong reasons. This could be an opportunity to rebuild/revise it for the right reasons as that attack, through threatened withholding of federal funds, forces colleges to rebrand/rename/rethink what are now known as DEI programs. That project would be to “build back better”— if we can, that is if more basic existential questions of institutional survival do not become overwhelming.
Thank you,
Naomi