Let’s not throw the DEI baby out with the bathwater

Conservative attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion accelerated sharply following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision ending the use of race in admissions in higher education. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that the educational benefits of diversity are not “sufficiently coherent” to pass constitutional muster.   

In the last two years, critics have blamed DEI for just about everything, from the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge to the scale of the Los Angeles wildfires. President Trump even suggested that DEI hires at the Federal Aviation Administration may have caused last year’s fatal midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a military helicopter. 

From the moment he returned to office, Trump has waged an all-out assault on “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’” His administration has closed DEI offices and programs across the federal government, pressured private companies to follow suit, and weaponized federal funding and civil rights investigations to compel colleges and universities to abandon “racial preferences” in admissions, financial aid and hiring. At least 22 states have piled on with their own anti-DEI legislation. 

In “The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea,” David B. Oppenheimer, a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, challenges Roberts’s view by tracing claims over the last two centuries that diverse groups outperform homogeneous ones in “solving problems, making discoveries, teaching and learning from each other and improving democratic discourse.”

The Supreme Court began to focus on the educational benefits of diversity in 1978, he reminds us, when Allen Bakke, a White man, alleged he had been denied admission to the University of California at Davis medical school in favor of less qualified minority applicants.  

In Regents........

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