2023 Academic DEI Debate

Debate Transcript:

A Note on the Transcript: This text was generated by an automated transcription service from the video recording of the live event. While it has been formatted for readability, it may not be a perfect representation of the spoken word and could include transcription errors. For critical reference, we recommend consulting the original video recording.

[0:07] J.R. Scott: All right, good evening, everyone. My name is J.R. Scott, and I am the co-president of the MIT chapter of the Adam Smith Society. Along with the MIT Free Speech Alliance, I would like to welcome you to tonight's debate about academic DEI programs.

Before introducing our moderator, I would like to take the time to thank a few organizations and individuals without whom this event would not occur. First, I would like to thank our 15 co-sponsors. Representatives from many of these organizations set up tables in the foyer outside of the debate, and I hope you had an opportunity to interact with all of them. From the MIT Free Speech Alliance, I would like to thank President Chuck Davis, Executive Director Peter Bonilla, Secretary Bill Frezza, and the rest of the executive committee for their tireless efforts putting up this debate over the past year.

[1:04] Now, to tonight's debate. The proposition to be debated is Resolved: that academic DEI programs should be abolished. As a reminder, we are being broadcast live on the alumni Free Speech Alliance's YouTube channel, and the recording will be made available for later viewing.

I'm honored to introduce the moderator of tonight's debate, Nadine Strossen. Professor Strossen is the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, professor emerita at New York Law School, and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Her most recent book is HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. She is also the host and project consultant for Free to Speak, a three-hour documentary film series that will be released this fall. Please join me in giving an enthusiastic welcome to Professor Strossen, who will introduce tonight's debaters and explain the debate rules.

[2:20] Nadine Strossen: Thank you so much for that warm welcome. Thank you for that very kind introduction, J.R., and thanks for all the work that you're doing to promote free speech at MIT. Before I introduce our distinguished debaters, I want to briefly highlight the importance of tonight's debate. The debate resolution, of course, raises issues of urgent concern, especially with the growing number of laws that target campus DEI programs. Regardless of our views about DEI in particular, the broad and vague language in some of these laws presents general academic freedom concerns. So our debate topic is now more relevant than ever.

Yet, too many people have argued that these issues should not be subject to debate, that debating them causes harm. Moreover, polls show that many people, including right here at MIT, don't dare to discuss this topic for fear of being accused of causing harm. So solely by participating in this debate, we participants all agree on one major overarching point... much as we might disagree about the specific debate resolution, we agree that these issues are not beyond debate.

And now I'm going to put on a prop... it says, "Make J.S. Mill Great Again," as in John Stuart Mill. And you know, John Stuart Mill demonstrated what he powerfully explained to be the benefits of questioning and debating even our most cherished ideas.

[6:46] Now, let me briefly introduce our distinguished debaters, highlighting a few facts that they themselves considered most important.

Starting with the affirmative team: Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Two of her recent books are The Diversity Delusion and The War on Cops. Heather's newest book is directly relevant to tonight's topic: When Race Trumps Merit.

Patanjali Kambhampati, who goes by Pat to everyone except his mother, is a chemistry professor at McGill University... As a lifelong egalitarian libertarian, Pat also advocates classical liberal principles, including in the DEI discussion.

Now for the negative team: Karith Foster is the CEO and founder of Inversity Solutions... She is a media personality, author, and specialist in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging... Karith has appeared in two recent films as an advocate for free speech and conscious communication. One was Can We Take a Joke? and the other one was No Safe Spaces.

Uh, finally, Pamela Denise Long, who goes by Denise... is a seventh-generation American, a doctoral candidate in organizational development. Denise is researching effective executive leadership for implementing anti-racism.

[9:26] Now, let me outline the debate format. Each speaker is going to have an eight-minute opening statement, alternating between the affirmative and negative teams. Each opening statement will immediately be followed by three minutes of cross-examination... Then each team will have five minutes for rebuttals... Finally, we'll turn to audience questions. So now it's time for our opening statement, our first opening statement, uh, from affirmative team speaker one, who is going to be Pat.

[10:43] Pat Kambhampati: Thank you, Nadine, and thank you to the MIT Free Speech Alliance for putting on this event... I'd like to make four basic points... The first point is, why should anyone listen to me?... The value that I can add to this discussion is I've been thinking about these ideas of so-called Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, or race and racism, or sex and sexism, and castes and castism ever since I was a child, having immigrated from India to America. So I immigrated from a third-world country with my parents. My parents experienced a considerable amount of difficulties in racism. We never thought of ourselves as victims... but certainly a marvelous country that made us able to succeed and fly as high as we want to.

The next question is, what about an intellectual approach?... The approach that I'd like to propose is the primacy of free speech. Free speech is central to human civilization... We are not supposed to have safe speech, we're not supposed to have kind speech, we're supposed to have a vast marketplace of free speech and ideas that we can consume, reject, debate, modify, do as we see fit.

The third point is, having established an intellectual approach, what is our value proposition? Our value proposition I take from Dorian Abbot and Ivan Marinovic, who came up with this idea of Merit, Fairness, and Equality... Merit means I'm going to judge you based upon your merits as an individual... not by the color of your skin or your organs or your religion or your nationality... Equality is the central point. We are equal under the law in American society.

Having said that, what is the opposite of Merit, Fairness, and Equality? Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity sounds wonderful... but these ideas are a wolf in sheep's clothing... Let's begin with Equity. Equity versus equality is a very different concept. Equity involves redistribution of resources... this falls under the auspices of what the Communists try to do, and the Communists now are becoming repackaged in a modern version called cultural Marxism... The cultural Marxism suggests that we are all collectives of one group against another, victims and oppressors. This is not how most of society works.

[18:24] Denise Long: (cross-examination) So thank you, Pat, for your statements. You mentioned selective empathy, and I'm curious to know the extent to which you feel MFE actually demonstrates selective empathy toward American Negroes, or descendants of slaves in the United States.

Pat Kambhampati: That's an excellent question, and I can say undoubtedly that I empathize greatly with the plight of African Americans, Indigenous Americans, and Indigenous Canadians... But that doesn't mean that I believe the solutions are the solutions of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. In my view, the solutions to historic problems are achieved by removal of barriers.

Denise Long: I have a question regarding, uh, your approval, I guess, of the Chris Rock special.

Pat Kambhampati: I like the idea of "selective outrage," which captures to me the zeitgeist of our times and again connects to selective empathy... I've been talking about selective empathy my whole life, especially in the last 10 years, when I see a tremendous amount of empathy going to some people but not others. It goes to African Americans but not to Asian Americans. It goes to women but not to men. It goes to trans but not to straights. And the people who get the least empathy of all are straight white men.

[21:17] Denise Long: (opening statement) MFE notes that Black Americans get special treatment from the government, are a protected group, and institutions offer American Negroes special set-asides. They're right. And Negroes should forever maintain a special relationship with our nation that enslaved us since 1776... American Negroes are those Black families who were emancipated from the threat of slavery in 1865. We are those folk who endured a hundred years of abhorrent, unimaginable, unconstitutional discrimination until 1960.

MFE ignores or dismisses or marginalizes the accumulated burdens and accommodations required by that history... Proponents of MFE say that DEI can make things worse, and they're right. And here's how DEI makes things worse: when advocates attempt to shoehorn the ambitions of all people onto the backs of the descendants of U.S. slaves and our legacy... To hook that to our legacy as slaves is wrong and egregious. Having said all that... what we miss out on the opportunity to do between DEI and MFE is to figure out, what do we do with the reality of the humans who live alongside us? Instead of arguing about philosophy, we ought to put our minds together to problem-solve that issue.

What I want to leave you with is this thought: we do not need to abolish DEI programs nor anti-racism. What we really ought to do is to urgently nuance how those programs function so that we ultimately achieve the aim of equality in our nation.

[29:13] Pat Kambhampati: (cross-examination) I happen to agree with most of what you said... The question that I would raise is... what should we do and how should we proceed? One, should we have the ability to freely debate things without fear of being canceled? And two, the questions of EDI are not specific to America and African Americans but are a global issue... How do you feel about its application to women and other minorities?

Denise Long: What I can speak to is obligations from that history. It's contextualized. The obligations in Australia are unique to Australia; the obligations in the United States are unique to the United States... I believe that Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and anti-racism does apply to all... Part of this, um, conversation or talking points within MFE is that "words can never hurt you." That's actually scientifically untrue and practically untrue. Words create worlds.

[32:24] Heather Mac Donald: (opening statement) I start from the following proposition: being female is not an accomplishment. My being female should play no role in my being hired for a job... I will go further: being Black, gay, or gender-fluid are also not accomplishments and should have nothing to do with faculty hiring or student admissions. The only thing that should matter when a medical school hires a researcher in pancreatic cancer, say, is whether that oncologist is the best in his field.

The DEI bureaucracy is the nemesis of the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge. It puts relentless pressure on every academic department to hire on the basis of race and sex, not on the basis of intellectual achievement... Every colorblind, objective test of academic skills, whether the SATs, LSATs, or the Medical College Admissions Test, is under attack as racist and is going down... The reason why colleges are not proportionally diverse has nothing to do with bias or exclusion. The reason is large racial differences in academic skills... In 2019... 66% of Black 12th graders did not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th-grade math skills... Only 7% of Black 12th graders were competent.

These gaps do not subsequently close... They mean that at present, you can have diversity or you can have meritocracy. You cannot have both... Diversity is simply a code word for preferences. But those preferences do no good to their alleged beneficiaries... Racial preference beneficiaries intending to major in STEM are far more likely to switch out of their intended major than their non-preferred peers... By all means, let us redouble our efforts to make sure that all children are prepared to succeed by focusing on a child's earliest years. Campus diversity bureaucrats have nothing to contribute to that effort... The university should embrace a single, colorblind definition of excellence. It will only do so, however, by eliminating DEI fiefdoms.

[40:20] Karith Foster: (cross-examination) Heather, you shared some astounding facts about the discrepancies, right, for Black and Hispanic students. And I'm just curious, um, that discrepancy... should we consider history or economics or simply write those students off as innately, inherently inferior?

Heather Mac Donald: That's not the issue before us, and of course they're not innately and inherently inferior. The question is, when you get to college, should there be preferences for them? And I would argue that preferences are cruel... You're putting Black students in college... at a competitive disadvantage. College is not going to solve the academic skills gap. It has to be solved at the earliest grades.

[43:29] Karith Foster: (opening statement) The idea of abolishing all DEI efforts... from higher education is throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater... All babies do deserve to live... Same for DEI efforts. And just as there are healthy and unhealthy ways to raise a child, there are healthy and toxic ways to conduct Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging efforts.

But before we dive into that, let's start with some fun facts. Did you know that until 1976, it was legal in the state of Missouri to exterminate Mormons?... Black exclusionary laws made it illegal for Black people to own land in Oregon. Those laws existed until they were eradicated in 2002... There's a segment of the population that is more likely to be struck and killed by self-driving cars like Tesla than any other group... spoiler alert, you're looking at one of those people... simply because we have darker melanated skin.

Now, why would that be? Is it because... Elon Musk and his mastermind scientists are inherently racist? I highly suspect that isn't the case. It has to do more with the fact that the algorithms and the software that detect human life didn't take into account that humans come in different hues... A diverse set of scientists during the inception of this technology likely would have remedied this. This is why DEI is important.

When DEI is done poorly, which let's be blatantly honest, it has taken a left turn, it creates insurmountable barriers of fear, mistrust, vengeance, and indifference... I believe indifference is the worst of these descriptors... When we stop being curious about one another, that is when we're in serious trouble... We need to reform DEI and all the conversations and programs around it.

[51:02] Heather Mac Donald: (cross-examination) Karith, if a physics department is looking for a researcher in dark matter... should he be disqualified because he can't pigeonhole his work into showing how it advances Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

Karith Foster: Absolutely not.

Heather Mac Donald: Do you have an example of a Black faculty member who was... not considered for his race?

Karith Foster: I am not aware of that.

Heather Mac Donald: Okay... When will it end? What is the endpoint? When do we know that we don't need DEI any longer?

Karith Foster: I don't think we'll ever know, unfortunately. I think this is the song that never ends... which is why we do need reform, without question.

[54:20] Rebuttals

Pat Kambhampati (Affirmative): I think the idea is that EDI or DEI... bears correspondence to economic Marxism a la cultural Marxism. I'm less interested in the specifics of African Americans in America as I am in the principle of DEI for all people.

Heather Mac Donald (Affirmative): The history of this country is heartbreaking... We were a white supremacist country, no question about it... Nobody would have predicted, however, that that has changed 100%... We should not be questioning our norms of excellence... We should be continuously upholding them and rather than lowering them for specific groups of people, because let us be honest, that is what this is about. It is about double standards.

Karith Foster (Negative): I believe the overarching error that many people make... is thinking that it's a two-way street. One of those lanes is that it's solely about race or ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. The other lane... is thinking that if we do diversity right... then everybody agrees in the end... That is the antithesis of true diversity. Real diversity is also diversity of thought and ideas... I've actually coined the term "inversity," right? Because we need to take the division out of it. Instead, we need to look inside.

Denise Long (Negative): So it's not lost on me that we're holding this event in Boston, Massachusetts, the grounds upon which our founders threw a massive tea party... and they took a stand on fulfilling the "rights of man." And what I know... is that that language, "fulfilling the rights of men," has been geared toward American freedmen, the descendants of slaves, ever since... While we deride double standards, we have 400 years of double standards of treatment, and we can't just decide that now the playing field is level when we've been digging out of a ditch.

[1:02:42] Audience Q&A

Nadine Strossen: Now it's time for the audience Q&A... let me start on this side.

[1:03:30] Audience Member: My question is... why are diversity offices the least diverse departments on campus?

Karith Foster: That's a great question, and I think it goes back to what I just said, that people have created this misnomer that to be diverse, you have to be Black or Hispanic... you have to be part of a marginalized group.

Heather Mac Donald: I would add to that issue, um, do historically Black colleges and universities have a diversity problem? They are at least 75% Black... Should they be moving towards a 13% Black, uh, population?

Denise Long: I do believe that historically Negro... institutions have a particular place in Black society. I do not believe that they should be subject to, uh, mandates to dilute the population or to increase the diversity.

[1:06:51] Audience Member: My question for the affirmative team... Do you believe that there are traits that may be advantageous in academia and engineering that can only be accounted for by DEI efforts, or can all qualities be measured by standardized testing?

Pat Kambhampati: I would say science is completely agnostic to your race, gender, religion... Other fields, not necessarily so... Science is not human experience.

Denise Long: All enterprises are human enterprises... And I don't think it was because the scientists were racist or sexist. I think they didn't have girlfriends.

[1:09:28] Audience Member: Do you really see a realistic path from the way DEI offices exist now... to your vision?

Karith Foster: I personally do... When I'm able to express the revised way of appreciating true diversity, I see the light bulbs go off... My belief is that the people who lead DEI need to be the people who are primarily experiencing the inequity.

Heather Mac Donald: I think in an academic context, I just would like the examples of what the inequities are that are being experienced today. I just, I don't think that's a reality that is large enough at the very least to justify these massive bureaucracies.

[1:11:36] Audience Member: You've both suggested that DEI is in some ways gone off the rails... I'm curious to hear why you think that it has gone the direction that it has gone.

Pat Kambhampati: I would posit that EDI or DEI was never a good idea. As I said, it was a wolf in sheep's clothing... We've created this culture of safe spaces and trigger warnings... and that created this idea of self-censorship where everyone's afraid to say what they think.

Denise Long: Part of the reason DEI... accelerated is because of the sense of urgency around very publicized, very disgusting, very obviously racist murders of Black Americans... How do we fix it? I think we... change the people who are leading the conceptualization and the implementation plans overall.

[1:16:09] Audience Member: What do you think for students who have been through this process, who have been let in on a lower bar, what can we do to go ahead and correctly address this issue?

Pat Kambhampati: This is exactly one of the dangerous points that Heather had brought up, which is that if you let in people who cannot maintain the average standards, then they often end up not learning as much as they could.

Denise Long: The universities that choose to let students in because they saw something in them... need to really have the capacity to support those students' success in all the ways that matter.

Heather Mac Donald: I would just say racial preferences are pernicious. They are evil. They are putting Blacks at a disadvantage and they are reaffirming stereotypes... 51% of Black law students after their first year of law school end up at the bottom tenth of their class compared to 5% of Whites.

[1:20:46] Audience Member: What should these interventions be [to close the skills gap]? Could you offer some specifics, please?

Heather Mac Donald: I think the family can do more. I think there can be—if everybody acted like Asians, we'd all be in Harvard... There's the obsessive attention to academic achievement... Also, we should have schools that are high expectations, no excuses... One of the early proponents... was a charter school chain called KIPP, and they had a motto that said, "Work hard, be nice."... They retracted that after the George Floyd race riots because they said it was racist.

[1:25:12] Audience Member: What do you see as some obstacles and some possible solutions for bringing more students and other young people into these conversations?

Karith Foster: Let's have brave spaces where you can show up as your authentic self but you can also be brave enough to hear ideas that are contradictory to your own... We have terrified these poor children.

Pat Kambhampati: The irony of it is we old folks are the ones who don't get along with each other... You young folks are the ones who are supposed to be open-minded... They're afraid to say what they think. You, when you're young, should be the most unafraid.

[1:32:45] Nadine Strossen: We're running out of time... I would propose... to have everybody who is standing at a microphone now to please briefly put your question, and then I'll give each speaker one minute or so to choose what you want to address.

[1:34:24] Audience Member: In the 1950s, many colleges and universities in the U.S. required anti-communist loyalty oaths for their professors... Here I have a list of 10 MIT job openings for tenure-track professorships, all of which require DEI statements... In what way is this not also compelled speech and also unconstitutional and illegal?

[1:35:14] Audience Member: If all of these DEI bureaucracies... have supposedly been wrong or corrupted, what exactly is your model for reform?

[1:35:45] Audience Member: The idea of needing to have lived experience in DEI bureaucracies is kind of interesting. The obvious question is, how do you eliminate the expectation bias that's inherent in people who have all of this lived experience?

[1:36:10] Audience Member: The pro-abolish side seems to me to be arguing against DEI programs as they exist... and the anti-abolish side seems to be arguing for DEI as it could be or ought to be. Do you agree with that?

[1:36:42] Audience Member: This is a question or comment for Denise. It seems like you were saying the 14th Amendment is only for African Americans... actually excluding Black immigrants.

[1:37:14] Audience Member: My concern about what you're saying about DEI, you're the only two pro-DEI people I've heard of in the entire globe who I would be willing to agree with. It sounds like the argument is kind of from the idea of the socialist to say, "Well, you just haven't tried the right kind of socialism."

[1:38:11] Audience Member: Do you think that DEI and anti-racism... should be woven into the very coursework that we take to become a college-educated person? Second question is, what do we do with professors who are not professors but activists of DEI in classrooms?

[1:38:49] Nadine Strossen: These were all great questions... I will now leave it to the speakers... to take a minute or so, please.

[1:39:18] Pat Kambhampati: I think someone asked a question about compelled speech. I think that was a brilliant question... Because of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, you must pledge allegiance to it, otherwise you will not be considered or hired in STEM... These are loyalty oaths. We must take loyalty oaths. Does anyone think that's a good idea? I don't think so.

[1:40:19] Denise Long: A competent DEI professional works with the faculty individually... to figure out... how to infuse DEI, anti-racism, into their course content... If you're an engineer... how do we talk about how you prepare your engineers to think about the fact that, yo, if you want to be an auto engineer, your car better not be running over Black folk?

[1:41:39] Heather Mac Donald: I still ask, what is the competence of DEI bureaucracies?... This country is ready, should be ready, to be post-racial. Most people want to be post-racial... The function of a DEI bureaucracy... is to keep America obsessively focused on racial divisions. That is not the way to overcome what was a horrifying, appalling history... The way to get beyond that racism is to start thinking about achievement, falling in love with knowledge.

[1:43:12] Karith Foster: Callback about DEI and that... cute little baby... I think what's happened is... we've brought that baby to a pool where everybody's supposed to be there having a good time, and nobody put a swim diaper on. And so now it's ruined for everyone. And that's what the DEI statements are doing.

[1:43:43] Nadine Strossen: Many, many thanks to the speakers and to the audience... and thanks to everybody for contributing to making J.S. Mill great again. Thank you very much. (Applause)