On April 4, the MIT Free Speech Alliance and the MIT Adam Smith Society held a much publicized, Oxford Union-style debate on the MIT campus to consider “Should Academic DEI Programs Be Abolished?” The in-person debate was also live-streamed and promoted by the Cornell Free Speech Alliance (CFSA), one of 15 co-sponsors.
Arguing in favor were Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Pat Kambhampati, a Chemistry Professor at McGill University. Arguing against were Pamela Long of Youthcentrix Therapy Services and Kaith Foster of INVERSITY Solutions. The debate was moderated by Nadine Strossen, past President of the American Civil Liberties Union. A video of the event is posted here.
MIT Leading Up To The Debate
In August 2021, Dorian Abbot, a geophysics professor at the University of Chicago, published an op-ed advocating “Merit-Fairness-and-Equality” (MFE) as an alternative to “Diversity-Equity-and Inclusion” (DEI) in Newsweek Magazine.
Before that article, January 2020, Abbot was invited to give a prestigious Carlson Lecture at MIT on geophysics, his area of expertise. The lecture was postponed due to COVID. However, people who disagreed with his unrelated Newsweek article on “MFE” insisted that he be canceled. Buckling to the pressure, MIT withdrew Abbot’s invitation. MIT alumni were so outraged that they formed the MIT Free Speech Alliance and organized a debate on the very topic that had prompted MIT to cancel Abbot’s geophysics lecture: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.
At first, MIT alumni tried to encourage their DEI leaders to debate or at least to attend the event. Meanwhile, MIT hired a new President and the faculty adopted stronger policies protecting freedom of speech. Ultimately, MIT’s DEI staff decided to offer their own speakers series instead of attending the debate. Abbot, in turn, published another DEI critique in Newsweek.
Cornell Leading Up to The Debate
The Cornell Free Speech Alliance (CFSA) was founded in November 2021 and sponsored two on-campus events in Spring 2022. CFSA decided to co-sponsor the MIT debate instead of hosting one of its own. The Cornell campus has not experienced any censorship or cancellations over the DEI vs. MFE issue specifically.
However, Cornell has witnessed two attempted cancellations of conservative faculty. In 2020, David Collum ‘77, the former chair of the Chemistry Department, posted a social media comment about a confrontation between an elderly protester and the Buffalo police. In response, the Sun ran an unsigned editorial demanding that Collum be fired.
In 2020, William Jacobson, a clinical law professor, posted two articles about the “history and tactics of the Black Lives Matter Movement” on his blog, Legal Insurrection. In one article, he wrote that the Black Lives Matter movement was “founded based on fraudulent narratives of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases.” Black student groups demanded his dismissal, and other clinical law faculty wrote to the Sun to denounce him without naming him explicitly. Cornell took no disciplinary action against either.
In response to the killing of George Floyd in June 2020, Cornell protestors demanded a number of new policies such as mandatory DEI training for faculty and a requirement that all faculty complete a DEI statement when applying for a contract extension or promotion. The Faculty Senate debated both plans, but passed a resolution making the faculty DEI training voluntary and dropped the DEI statement requirement before the final vote.
So, unlike MIT, Cornell had stiff pushback when DEI advocates sought to assert power over their critics. On the other hand, no Cornell official has ever attempted to justify why DEI is a better approach than MFE.
Key Moments in The Debate
Perhaps the actual debate was eclipsed by an excellent pre-debate interview of Mac Donald and Kambhampati broadcast by the National Association of Scholars. With more generous time constraints, they stated their full arguments against DEI.
The debate itself drew more than 200 people in a sell-out crowd in an auditorium filled with bald and graying heads. Very few students appeared in the crowd. There were also over 800 people watching the Zoom livestream.
Strossen introduced the topic by noting that “All the debaters agree… that the topic is not above debate.” She also acknowledged that the Abbot cancellation “galvanized and continues to galvanize [MIT’s] commitment to free speech principles.”
Many observers of the debate felt that Heather Mac Donald was the best prepared and most effective of the four debaters. Her most important point was that it is more effective to put resources into early childhood education to reduce the achievement gap between economically disadvantaged students and their peers. By the time that those students reach the college-based DEI programs, they fall under tremendous pressure to keep up and to perform academically. Mac Donald cited statistics for a high percentage of black 12th graders who were not “college ready.”
Prof. Kambhampati argued, “Equity implies a redistribution of resources … We had economic Marxism and we now have ‘cultural Marxism’ in Cambridge in 2020.”
Long and Foster did not try to defend DEI as it is commonly implemented at colleges. Instead, they tossed aside all of the disadvantaged groups who are under the “diversity” umbrella and focused upon affirmative action as a reparation for the harm suffered by generations of African Americans. Long said, “MFE ignores or marginalizes the cumulative burden of that history.”
The Fourteenth Amendment was written to help freed slaves and should not now be applied by the Courts to prevent continued remedies for this past harm. In effect, it seemed that these panelists were anticipating the Supreme Court ruling in the upcoming decision in the Harvard and UNC admissions cases. They also seemed to echo the arguments made by Stanford Prof. Richard Ford when he delivered this year’s MLK lecture at Cornell.
Long also argued, “DEI also gets anti-racism wrong by getting into an ‘oppressor – oppressed’ dichotomy … If we focus on the goal, we can accomplish the goal of equality in this generation.”
Foster also said, “Let’s have brave spaces,” instead of safe spaces.
Questions from the Audience
As the last part of the debate, the four took questions from the audience. One asked why DEI offices are the least diverse on the campus. MacDonald asked if DEI is mandating that elite institutions should admit students to reflect national demographics, then why should not Historically Black Colleges and Universities also be mandated to reflect those same demographics.
One audience member brought up the fact that the Health Tracker app for the Apple Watch did not have a menstrual period tracker. Would DEI hiring have avoided that oversight? The response was from Long: “All enterprises are human enterprises.” Foster said, “I don’t think that Apple scientists were sexist, they didn’t have girl friends.”
One question quoted the debaters as saying the DEI has “gone off the rails.” He asked in what direction did it go off the rails and what is the solution? Prof. Kambhampati replied, “Cancel culture is a run-away train in the last several years.”
Impact of the Debate
It is doubtful that anyone’s opinion of DEI was changed by listening to the debate. Nor did the debate provide any pathway to discuss the issue with others. The revelation that DEI is viewed by its advocates as merely a means for reparation of past harm visited uniquely upon African Americans will shut down more conversations than it encourages.
Whatever the debate achieved for the MIT campus, its impact is not transferable to Cornell. Cornell’s very large DEI bureaucracy has more of a behind-the-scenes strategy. Rather than re-examine Cornell requiring 2.5 hours of DEI training from the Intergroup Dialogue Project (IDP) in new student orientation, Cornell has merely ended the role of the all-student Orientation Committee in leading the overall onboarding process.
In 2019, Cornell held a broad based discussion to adopt a mission statement and core values. The final documents did not endorse either DEI or MFE. Instead, it values “A Community of Belonging” where Cornellians “feel empowered to engage in any community conversation.” Nobody is seriously suggesting that the extended Cornell discussion in 2019 should be replaced by the outcome of a one hour debate held on the MIT campus.
If individual DEI administrators at Cornell are misapplying Cornell’s approved core values that should be quickly corrected.
In theory, controversies about free speech and discussions of many controversial policies at Cornell could be solved by gathering as a group and talking through the issues. However, Cornell rarely does that. Just as the MIT Free Speech Alliance has not taken an official position on DEI v. MFE, the debate leaves both schools up in the air as to next moves on this topic.
