It looks like I have rambled on. Too much time sitting on an airplane. My apologies.
@worriedmomucb, there is a distinction between the likely original idea and the implementation of DEI. The former is probably well-intentioned, but the latter has been over-reaching at institutions I know and has become philosophically repugnant. More than that, being accused of acting in contravention of the DEI department can be career suicide if people say that you are writing or doing something that makes them uncomfortable. Although some of the conservatives leading the charge at DEI are probably unhappy that blacks, gays and women are represented at all at elite universities, most folks probably recognize that there has been discrimination that would in principle cause members of certain groups to be feel uncomfortable and experience discrimination.
I was a middle-class Jewish kid and feel really fortunate to have attended three of the most elite schools in the country, each of which had in the prior generation had quotas to limit the number of Jews. I recall going to an admitted students party at the health of an upper class WASP alum and not really being sure about the social rituals (I came from a pretty Asperber’s family also). The wood paneling and stone arches of my undergraduate school reeked of WASP aristocracy. I actually went out with a wonderful young woman who was a third-generation legacy and whose mother’s family came over on the Mayflower. The GF was great and so was the Dad. The mother was clearly antisemitic. The school had a rule stating that there was a fine for missing the first day of classes and in two of the four years, the first day of classes coincided with Rosh Hashanah. They did not enforce it, but as a freshman, I actually was concerned I would have to pay a fine. No one had ever thought to check. So, I can empathize with a need for a sense of inclusion and belonging. (Incidentally by the time I got my PhD and was a professor, I no longer experienced any antisemitism. That gold era has unfortunately passed.)
There should be zero discrimination at Harvard or any school based on race, religion, gender, etc. But, equity and inclusion have, in their implementation become problematic. Equity is, in the hands of some DEI admins, equated with equality of outcome – the prima facia evidence for lack of equity is disproportionate outcomes. There is a lawsuit that reached killed the Canadian Supreme court arguing that a math test for elementary school teachers was racist and unconstitutional because blacks failed it a a higher rate. (Fortunately, the Supreme Court killed it, but without addressing the fundamental issue).
And equity sometimes takes on a very different tone. ShawWife is a very talented painter and for years experienced discrimination for being female. To take a few examples, in art school, she was a TA for a famous art school professor who would put his hands inside her shirt and pants even after she objected. She objected and filed a complaint with the school. The helpful soul in HR said, “It’s not personal. That’s just X being X.” Because they would not act, she quit the TA position and could get another TA position and as a non-American did not have a work visa so she supported herself baking bread for the town’s restaurants and selling it under the table, so to speak. Many years later, during the Me Too era, the school was reviewing their files and saw a real formal complaint and called and asked her if she wanted to proceed with a claim against him. In her final year, there was a prize for artistic merit (best student in the school or most promising or something). She was the number one candidate, but her mentor called her from the committee choosing the beneficiaries of honors to say that the committee who agreed she was the best artist that year but were in the process of giving the award to a guy who had a family and not to her, since she was going out with me and I was clearly on a high earning path. I suggested that they give her the award and give the guy the prize, which they did. Later, we were living in NY and a very good gallery that had agreed to take her into their stable of artists dropped her when they saw she was pregnant. Although she shows in good galleries and museums, her career did not advance as far as some similar males whose work is either worse or no better. There was period from the start of Me Too until George Floyd’s death, museums decided to promote women who had clearly experienced discrimination in the arts (remember the Guerilla Girls who used to say that the only way women could get into the major museums was to pose with their clothes off) . With the death of George Floyd, a switch flipped. Several museum directors or curators have told her, in some cases apologetically because they love her work, that they have a backlog of several years where they can only show BIPOC artists – white women need not apply. When we have mentioned it to some of her friends , some (including the mom of the anti-capitalists) say, “Well it is only fair since they were excluded for so long.” Often the work they are showing ranges from truly outstanding to embarrassingly bad – we saw a show of Native American art at the Whitney, I think, which had the full range. There is a need to ensure that good artists (or good students) not be excluded because of their race or sex (or any other category) but the implementation of this policy can be troublesome.
In some cases, immediately increasing the numbers has negative consequences if the change in policy does not include real supports for those who have been selected. I was talking about DEI with my son, who had engineered for his last two undergraduate years to live in a suite of about 10, whom he more or less selected, bridging a couple of friend groups. In this group, there was a gay male, a black male, a gay female, a Blazian woman from a rural HS in the midwest, a trans male, a black female, etc. His school prided it picked underprivileged kids, many of whom were black (unlike Harvard, that for years used to take a high proportion of black kids who’d gone to prep schools, had wealthy parents, or were West Indian). He noted that the underprivileged kids in his crew tended to be not prepared enough in math to take subjects that required a strong math background (I talked to another very bright young woman who also attended his school whose parents emigrated from Venezuela to Houston and attended a weak inner-city HS and wanted to major in physics but when she got to college, she realized she was two years behind in math). Instead, many of these kids ended up majoring in softer subjects (psychology, African-American studies, English, etc.). The school did not help prepare them for the academic challenges but then also did provide coaching or guidance. The kids with upper middle class parents were given guidance about majors, the need to get internships, the need to get the right kind of jobs at school (in the case of my son, at least). And so several of the kids from underprivileged backgrounds in his crew ended up with big debts and taking jobs as public school teachers. A few years ago, they attended coding bootcamps and switched to lower level coding jobs but are at least 10 years behind where they would have been had they taken computer science or data science classes as undergraduates. My son is offended about the lack of support the school gave his less privileged classmates. Anthony Jack has written a very thoughtful book called The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, which notes many ways in which colleges don’t provide the support that underprivileged students need.
There are very real problems to address, but first step is to help the aspiring physics major learn the math she needs in HS by improving education for poorer kids or give her a year of preparatory courses between HS and college. She struck me as very bright and is doing well in an alternate academic area, but forcing her away from physics and to a softer area does not solve the problem of discrimination in American society. Instead, many DEI departments see their role as putting a finger on the scale for the poorer, darker, less privileged as they compete with the richer, whiter, more privileged. And then, when protected classes are underrepresented as physics majors, the DEI folks define the problem either as discrimination by the physics department or Eurocentric standards. I kid you not, there is a whole set of academic papers on decolonizing mathematics (although a small number of these are not nearly as stupid as I might have guessed) some of which assert that math is racist.
In general, I think the implementation of DEI can often be pretty repugnant even though the original intent had good motives.