Critics Are Wrong About DEI at Harvard, but There’s Plenty of Room To Improve

There are two Harvard Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs: The one you read about in the press, and the one that actually exists.

Since October, Harvard’s leadership crisis has touched many issues, from antisemitism, to free speech, to plagiarism, to corporate governance. The criticism that connects them all? DEI has gone too far at Harvard, and it’s compromised the University’s commitment to excellence.

As students who actually engage with Harvard’s DEI programs we feel obliged to set the record straight: A DEI leviathan does not control our University from the shadows.

Don’t take our word for it — you can look for yourself. Each of the University’s diversity, inclusion, and belonging units prominently feature links to staff directories. Most have only a handful of names.

Big-picture, Harvard has a central Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging that deals with University-wide programming and coordinates the individual school units, which largely provide tangible student services, like the College’s Office of BGLTQ Student Life and the Women’s Center.

Even if you come away from your staff directory deep dive convinced that Harvard engages too many staff for its inclusion efforts, the point remains: They hardly spend their time handpicking University Presidents, controlling disciplinary outcomes, or otherwise pulling the strings at this University.

These offices certainly do not loom large in our daily lives — many of us rarely interact with them at all — but when we do, we often benefit in real, meaningful ways.

Among the events and initiatives funded by Harvard’s DEI offices are: The First Year Retreat Experience pre-orientation program, which provides incoming first-generation and low-income students with guidance on navigating Harvard; the Cultural Rhythms Festival, a multi-day celebration that features performances, food, and other events; funding for medical textbooks that more accurately represent the wide range of human body types; and lectures from high-profile speakers like former United States Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch ’81.

DEI efforts like these plainly do not mean we “blew up the excellence model,” as some outsiders have suggested. In fact, programming of this kind enables excellence, helping to ensure that talented students from backgrounds underrepresented at elite colleges can nevertheless flourish there.

It’s no coincidence that study after study has demonstrated that more diverse teams aren’t just more inclusive — they’re more successful.

Though many of the most ubiquitous critiques are ill-founded, Harvard’s DEI programs do fall short in important ways.

A meager 23 percent of tenured faculty are non-white. More than two-thirds of students come from the top 20 percent of the income distribution. And despite more than half a century of student interest, Harvard has yet to establish an Ethnic Studies department.

More recently, controversies over student protest have loudly reminded us of the tricky questions that arise when a commitment to free expression encounters value frameworks hostile to speech that they regard as inflicting real harm. To the extent that DEI programs share or contribute to such frameworks, they can conflict with our commitment to academic freedom.

Reasonable people can disagree over how best to address these deficiencies and deliver on lowercase diversity, equity, and inclusion. For instance, University Professor Danielle S. Allen has raised concerns that OEDIB efforts don’t adequately incorporate religious identity and can prove divisive, while others vocally defend the DEI status quo.

Rather than keep quiet about DEI altogether — the University is still yet to comment publicly on criticisms of its DEI programming — Harvard should openly engage about its practices and make itself a forum for discussing these difficult questions.

To be clear, open engagement cannot mean uncritically acceding to the larger assault on honest conversations about identity and power in America.

We have heard this story before — the only difference is the three letters in the acronym. Before DEI, the right used Critical Race Theory to raise the specter of so-called wokeness infiltrating American education.

Also like CRT, DEI has real value. Critical Race Theory helps us understand how racism pervades American institutions to this day; DEI done well provides a roadmap for improvement. (They’re certainly not “an existential crisis to the United States” as Christopher F. Rufo would have you believe.)

Such attacks on these frameworks draw attention away from the necessary work of grappling with systemic racism, and they’re not limited to universities.

Nationally, state governments have considered more than 300 bills limiting what can be taught in K-12 education with many focused on so-called “divisive concepts” or topics related to race and racism. In Oklahoma, a 2021 law went so far as to encourage teachers to avoid even using the term “diversity.”

DEI efforts are far from perfect. But it helps nobody to imagine monstrous flaws that don’t exist. Realizing the ideals of DEI requires we critique and improve the system we actually have.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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