PBS News Hour

AMNA NAWAZ: The debate in colleges and universities over diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, or DEI, has been heating up around the country.

And the backlash politically and socially to previous programs has been growing.

As part of our ongoing Race Matter series, John Yang unpacks the debate and examines the stakes in higher education.

JOHN YANG: Amna, Utah's Spencer Cox is the latest governor to sign a new law banning any state funding for programs dedicated to promoting diversity, including at state colleges and universities.

Utah joins five other states, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Tennessee.

They all have laws on the books restricting or banning DEI.

Lawmakers in 25 states have introduced more than 70 bills targeting DEI efforts at public institutions.

The issue has flared up in the wake of the October 7 attacks in Israel and the war against Hamas.

It sparked debates over tolerance, inclusion and academic freedom.

Shaun Harper is the executive director of the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, and Greg Lukianoff is CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is a free speech organization.

Shaun, I'd like to start with you.

What is lost when these offices are closed?

SHAUN HARPER, Executive Director, USC Race and Equity Center: Sure.

Well, first off, thanks for having us.

An institution loses its fidelity to its mission.

There are nearly 5,000 colleges and universities across the United States.

Most of them include some language in their missions about preparing students for citizenship in a diverse democracy and other commitments to offering and assuring an inclusive learning environment for all students.

That is lost as institutions walk back their commitments to DEI.

What's also lost is our ultimate contribution to the defense of our democracy.

It is dangerous to send millions of college-educated people into the world and into our professions underprepared to deal with the inequities that have long disadvantaged our democracy.

JOHN YANG: Greg, from your point of view, why should the offices go away?

GREG LUKIANOFF, CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: Because they're a threat to free speech and academic freedom on campus and have been consistently for as long as they have been called DEI offices.

Before that, the biggest threat we have seen to free speech and academic freedom on campus are administrators themselves.

But we have had particular issues with DEI administrators, including at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Syracuse, UMass, Boston, UCLA, University of Toledo.

We had a case at University of Michigan where a professor was investigated by the DEI department for showing the old "Othello" from the 1960s with Laurence Olivier in blackface.

Our research indicates the greater the relative size of DEI bureaucracy to university, the more discomfort students feel expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with each other.

And this is one of the things that has been missing with mainstream coverage of this situation.

JOHN YANG: Shaun, what about that?

Threat to academic freedom.

It creates a big bureaucracy.

What do you say to that?

SHAUN HARPER: Yes.

I am a tenured professor who very much enjoys his academic freedom.

So let me not be a hypocrite on this point.

I think what is lost and misunderstood in these broad brushes with which DEI gets mispainted is that these occasional sort of one-offs are examples of what's happening in every academic department, in every office, on every campus.

That's just not the case, right?

I have studied literally millions of college students, literally millions on hundreds of campuses.

And I have to tell you that students of color, most especially, are not feeling like colleges are as liberal and as welcoming and inclusive as the DEI obstructionists are claiming them to be.

The evidence is the exact opposite, as a matter of fact.

There isn't enough emphasis placed on DEI.

People who lead those offices often don't have the budgets and the staffing that they need to help the institution make good on the commitments that it has made to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion.

JOHN YANG: Greg, are you a diversity obstructionist?

(LAUGHTER) GREG LUKIANOFF: Am I a diversity obstructionist?

I feel like a lot of what I learned from the way we argue in academia today is, you just come up with like greater and greater insult technology as if it's an argument.

So, at UCLA, for example, in 2020, after a student complained about a professor reading MLK's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," which does include racial slurs, UCLA referred him to the DEI office.

And so this is not an occasional thing.

And, by the way, 2020 and 2021 were the two worst years we've seen for professor cancellations in our history at FIRE.

And, as best we can tell, we haven't seen anything like it since the law was established way back in 1973.

So, we have actually been in an academic freedom crisis.

And, lately, it's actually been very much directed at pro-Palestinian voices, which we have been very busy defending.

But I do think that, ultimately, it's not just the DEI and the administrative bloat at universities are costing students more.

They are actually, in many cases, undermining one of the fundamental functions of a university.

JOHN YANG: Shaun, I don't want to put words into Greg's mouth, but I have heard others argue against DEI, saying that colleges and universities are essentially indoctrinating students in sort of left-wing views.

What do you say to that?

SHAUN HARPER: Yes, listen, I'm a past president of the American Educational Research Association.

I value research and evidence, not anecdotes.

And I have to say, again, that the research makes painstakingly clear that students of color and white students alike, the overwhelming majority of them do not feel like they're being indoctrinated.

In fact, many of them tell us in our surveys and certainly in our qualitative research that they don't learn enough about race and racism, about other dimensions of DEI.

The other thing that I will say about those who recklessly claim that there's just all of this indoctrination, I wonder, when was the last time they sat in more than one DEI program?

How many programs have they actually sat in and been a part of?

Who were the presenters?

Were those presenters indeed indoctrinating people and insulting them and dividing them?

Is that a thing that happens in every DEI workshop?

Does it happen in most DEI workshops?

I can tell you declaratively, in the ones that we do here at the USC Race and Equity Center, across K-12 schools, higher ed institutions and corporations, that's not what we do here.

And that's not how professionals experience what we deliver.

JOHN YANG: Greg, these efforts against state -- DEI programs at state and public schools, particularly, are often described or framed as conservative political activism.

Is that fair or accurate?

GREG LUKIANOFF: I think -- I think that's -- I think that's relatively fair.

And we have opposed, for example, the Stop WOKE Act in Florida, which we thought was laughably unconstitutional, because it actually went beyond, because a lot of these attempts to get rid of DEI administrators are constitutional, because administrators don't have special academic freedom of protections.

But some of these laws restrict the rights of -- free speech rights of students and the curricular rights of professors.

So, the Stop WOKE Act in Florida was a great example of something that was unconstitutional.

We challenged it in court.

We defeated it so far, and it's currently on appeal.

But there have been several attempts that have actually badly implicated academic freedom.

And every time those come up, we fight them in court.

JOHN YANG: Shaun, if DEI offices do such good work and so -- are so desirable, why these laws are passing, why this sort of backlash against DEI?

SHAUN HARPER: Well, they are part of an actual politicized movement that is succeeding.

There is a playbook that is being passed from state to state and to cities and towns within states.

So there's a strategy that is absolutely succeeding.

And that strategy is largely fueled by misinformation and disinformation about what's happening on campuses based on anecdotes, based on rumors, not based on robust samples of thousands and millions of students and higher ed workers.

JOHN YANG: Greg, I started with Shaun.

I'm going to let you have the last word.

You reacted quite a bit there to what Shaun was saying.

GREG LUKIANOFF: We have -- the research indicating the strength of DEI programming is actually very weak.

The research indicating that there's been a major threat to academic freedom and freedom of speech over the past several years is extremely strong., in terms of the number of professors we have seen lose their jobs.

And, to be clear, threats come from both the right and the left.

But we're talking about 200 professors fired since you saw the escalation of professors getting fired around 2014, 2017.

And that's twice as many professors who were fired under the standard estimates of McCarthyism.

And what's different is, the law is supposed to protect them now.

So I really want people to take the situation for academic freedom and free speech on campus more seriously.

And there's no way to protect it with as massive bureaucracies that we currently have in higher ed today.

JOHN YANG: Gentlemen, I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it there.

We're out of time.

But, Greg Lukianoff and Shaun Harper, thank you both very much for a spirited discussion.

GREG LUKIANOFF: Thanks for having me.

SHAUN HARPER: Thank you.