Inclusivity Above All Else
The Marine Corps taught me that ethics and morals are distinguished by a hierarchy. To make a simple example, stealing is morally wrong. But letting your family or your team starve? Also morally wrong. What happens when you must steal a loaf of bread, lest your family starve? Ethics allows us to weigh competing values and navigate tradeoffs when moral truths come into irreconcilable conflict. We do so by our ethos, which answers the question of who we are at a fundamental level.
These concepts are linked by more than etymology. Any person or institution that lacks a clear hierarchy of values and the character to enact them is bound for either paralysis or hypocrisy. The thickest moral claims inevitably create conflict because they demand real sacrifices. My rights create your responsibilities and vice versa.
Dartmouth’s official values are posted online, and as far as value statements go, these seem fine. Does this ethos align with our official actions and communications? On the ground, do these official values carry rhetorical and persuasive force with students and administrators? I believe that we are experiencing a turning point in higher education where vague notions of inclusivity dominate our hierarchy of values.
When the College restricted student access to buildings outside of their “house community” (popularly known as “arbitrary and meaninglessly grouped buildings”) the justification was not excellence, but rather safety amidst the bogeyman of past racial bias incidents. Dartmouth’s racists will now be forced to prowl their own assigned meaningless and arbitrary groups of buildings.
In a recent interview with Associate Professor Lucas Swaine of the Government Department, an erstwhile undergraduate interviewer asks repeatedly how Professor Swaine and Dartmouth’s Government Department promote inclusivity. Professor Swaine advocates for the elimination of bias, viewpoint diversity, and treating individuals equally with respect while taking their ideas seriously in pursuit of the truth. Notably, the interview places these values in the service of inclusivity.
Our architecture is now designed to be an “inviting and inclusive space” — whether it is beautiful or awe-inspiring or timeless is unclear or unworthy of mention.
When the GLC cuts funding to Greek houses for hosting performance groups because of inclusivity’s demands on undergraduate budgets ($150K of the Special Programs and Events Committee’s $197K budget goes to events that “celebrated different identities or heritage groups”), the presidents of Dartmouth’s performance groups protested in their letter that the “funding cut will run counter to the goal of inclusivity.” There is no higher virtue or authority to appeal to.
Inclusivity does a lot of heavy lifting at Dartmouth and across higher education these days. Cynically, “diversity and inclusion” is now the progressive thought leader’s equivalent to the “thoughts and prayers” of conservatives. If the invocation of inclusivity is sufficient to guide a presidential task force, what can’t it do?
I regard inclusivity just as I regard notions like civility — these are fine and valuable organizational features, but they are no raison d’être for a liberal arts college. We misunderstand this distinction at our peril.
The famed George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen interviewed the famed NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt back in 2016. Haidt shared the following:
Again, you’re looking at it like you look at these giant systems, and then let’s take that analogy to another giant system, but you have to think about what is each system designed to produce. Diversity is divisive. There’s a lot of social science research on this, the more you make something diverse, the less trust there will be, the harder it is for people to work together.
If you’re the US military, or any military, yes in the ’70s the Army in particular embraced ethnic diversity, and they did a great job of it. It’s actually quite striking that the military has done — that things have gotten better and better and better in terms of racial climate in the military, and worse and worse and worse in the academy, we can come back to that. If you’re the military, you need cohesion, and that’s what they say — above all, unit cohesion, we must have that.
You want to basically bury racial and other kinds of diversity in a sea of uniformity. You want to give people a sense of common mission, you have common uniforms, so you want to make people feel they’re all part of the same — that’s what you do if you need a group to function effectively together.
In the academy that is not our goal. We’re not trying to turn out classes of “our graduating class will go forth, and they will all work together as a unit to accomplish greatness.” No, that’s not what it’s all about. We want clashing ideas.
Haidt continues:
It’s what is the sacred value. The sacred value of universities from sometime in the 19th century through maybe the 1980s was truth. Now it was not perfect, but we all talked that way. Look at the mottos of Harvard and Yale — Veritas, Lux et Veritas, it’s right there on the motto, veritas, truth.
We made a big show — it was largely true — of saying this is what we’re here for, we’re here to find truth. But in the 1970s and ’80s as we had a big influx of baby boomers who were involved in social protest, who were fighting for very good causes, civil rights, women’s rights — they flood into the academy in ’70s and ’80s, they get tenure in the ’80s and ’90s, but also in the 1990s, the Greatest Generation begins to retire. There were a lot of Republicans who became professors after World War II.
But the ’90s is the decade where everything flips. At the start of the 1990s, the overall left‑right ratio of the academy, taking all departments, was two to one, just twice as many people on the left as right. That’s fine, that’s not a problem. But by 2005, it had gone to five to one, five people on the left for every one on the right. Those people on the right are mostly engineering, nursing, things like that. If you look at the core — the humanities and the social sciences, other than economics, it’s closer to 10 to 1 or 20 to 1.
In other words, right‑wing, or libertarian, or social conservative voices have basically vanished between 1995 and 2005. This has made us unfunctional, but it’s in the social sciences and humanities where the sacred value has become social justice and the protection of victims. That’s the division. One university of the sciences still pursues truth, the other university in the social sciences and humanities pursues social justice.
Which university are we?
