Hamline, DEI, and consumerism in higher ed

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The DEI industry and its role in the university's appeal to "consumers" (formerly known as students)

A lot of sensible remarks in this CHE essay about the Hamline fiasco: The DEI profession began as workplace diversity trainings aimed at protecting corporations from costly discrimination lawsuits, and it plays a similar role today. As such, it is...

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The DEI profession began as workplace diversity trainings aimed at protecting corporations from costly discrimination lawsuits, and it plays a similar role today. As such, it is woefully inadequate for addressing with nuance the racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and other real challenges students may face on college campuses and elsewhere. DEI offices tend to reduce complex issues to manageable problems with ready-made responses. The idea that intention (messy, subjective) matters less than impact (objective, measurable), for example, found enthusiastic embrace in the world of corporate HR and DEI, already obsessed with quantifiable metrics like “impact factor.”

Rather than improving overall campus climate, institutions like DEI offices wind up cultivating student fragility — something they need to do in order to justify their continued existence and funding. The more easily students are offended, the more the university needs a robustly funded DEI program to manage them. This vicious cycle plays out on college campuses across the country. Indeed, the Muslim students at Hamline resemble their non-Muslim peers at universities elsewhere. They assert themselves as consumers and ask to speak to the manager when unhappy with the service they’ve received.

That ethos of customer service has prevailed as universities are increasingly run like businesses. Ultimately, DEI is a management strategy, illustrated by the way the university skillfully pitted its “customers” (outraged students) against its “staff” (the adjunct instructor), directing conflict away from “management” (the administration). In years past, authoritarian Muslim states found similar utility in whipping up anger over international cartoon controversies in order to distract from their citizens’ domestic demands.

Yet while this strategy may have appeased the offended students at Hamline in the short term, it has only served to undermine the university’s standing as an academic institution, and may affect its already-rocky financial status as well. The free-speech watchdog FIRE has filed a formal complaint with Hamline’s accreditor over the university’s handling of the incident. And even DEI practices can quickly become problems: In a press conference held in support of Hamline’s handling of the incident, the Minnesota branch of CAIR claimed that the instructor’s warning before showing the painting of the prophet — a “content warning,” in DEI jargon — itself constituted “harm.”

As the university loses its sense of mission and purpose, and as the ranks of administrators like DEI officials grow in ever more disproportion to the faculty, students can hardly be blamed for not thinking of the campus as a space for learning and knowledge, a place where ideas can be debated.