(Note: I wrote the original post about 10 months ago, but am only publishing it now. I have edited it since then, both for content, clarify, and style. But it's essentially the same post.)
I won't disclose what I do for a living or where exactly I work, but I can say that I work in an academic adjacent job at a very big public institution with locations in five cities and possibly more than 20,000 employees.
My employer has apparently commanded all its units to eliminate DEI requirements for hiring and for assessing job performance.
The details are frustratingly vague, and the process by which my employer arrived at this decision is even vaguer. It's not clear who in the institution's top management are responsible for the order. It's not clear why they are making the order. Have they been threatened directly by the present administration? Are they acting in compliance with a recent (last summer) memo from the Department of Justice? Are they doing anticipatory compliance in the hopes that the institution will not be a target for more drastic changes?
Read below the fold for more:
I don't know the answers, though I suspect it's mostly anticipatory obedience.
Another complication. Each unit has some authority to adopt policies regardless of what the employer says. So the employer's command to eliminate the DEI language is part "command" and part "request." One point of contention is whether the institution's command is violating units' prerogatives to set their own policies and whether it violates a strange idea called "shared governance."
So all of that puts me in a bind. I have been for a long time critical of DEI programs. Now, my unit has had to decide whether to accept those commanded changes or whether to reject them. I have voted with the very large majority of my colleagues to reject them. That is, I've voted to keep the DEI language.
In a different context, I may very well be open to eliminating or sharply curtailing the current DEI language. Or at least I would be open to better guarantees that someone won't be punished for voicing reservations, however mild, to some of the things said and done in the name of DEI.
It is, by the way, a bit rich to hear some of my colleagues complain about censorship when they have been at the forefront of censoring others. Yeah, I know: there are different kinds of "censorship." Social and professional pressure of the sort my colleagues engage in is very different from government diktats that seem to be inching ever closer to commanding that we affirm certain views. But there is a family resemblance that my colleagues seem unable or unwilling acknowledge. In that vein, I sign on to most of what Alan Jacobs says in this post, which I recommend you read. Of course, what I'm calling censorship is arguably just the fact that my workplace, like all workplaces, has behavioral and language norms.
But who among us are innocent of hypocrisy? Not I. And regardless: I maintain and have maintained for a long time that others' hypocrisy is not by itself sufficient to resolve most any question. Someone can be a hypocrite and yet be right. If a doctor who smokes three packs a day tells you that smoking is bad for your health, you should probably heed her advice to quit smoking.
The bad thing, in this case, is the anticipatory obedience, or what Timothy Snyder calls "obeying in advance." If the goal is to prevent more drastic intrusions, it probably won't work. Even if it does work, deleting the language is still capitulation. And it's capitulation to an attempt to impose a totalitarian orthodoxy. I don't like the DEI scripts I'm quasi-required to affirm. But I certainly don't like the state imposing its own scripts. (I'll leave unaddressed in this post the fact that my employer is, in its own way, the state and its DEI scripts are in a sense also the state's scripts.) My colleagues may be mistaken. But they mean well, and the worst they could do is get me fired. The government, on the other hand, has guns.
Maybe anticipatory obedience to something wrong is sometimes defensible. I'm not prepared to say it's always the wrong choice. I myself have made that choice on a smaller scale with many issues before now. I submit that most of you have, too. (Cue in, again, the specter of hypocrisy.)
This isn't about DEI. It's not about academic freedom. It's not even about what some people call "shared governance." It's about resisting totalitarianism.
No comments:
Post a Comment