They argue that “D.E.I. programs often assign participants to identity categories based on rigid distinctions,” and mention that “[i]n a D.E.I. training program at Stanford a few years ago, Jewish staff members were assigned to a ‘whiteness accountability’ group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism.”
“The former D.E.I. director at a Bay Area community college described D.E.I. as based on the premises ‘that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.’ She was also told by colleagues and campus leaders that ‘Jews are ‘white oppressors,’ and her task was to ‘decenter whiteness.’”
“Rather than correcting stereotypes, diversity training too often reinforces them and breeds resentment, impeding students’ social development,” they continue.
Brest and Levine continue to argue that DEI programs can be counterproductive, hurting the supposed beneficiaries of such initiatives by “instilling a victim mind-set and pitting students against one another.”
As an alternative to current DEI programs, the Stanford professors argue that American colleges and universities need programs based “on a pluralistic vision of the university community combined with its commitments to academic freedom and critical inquiry.”
Discussing the harmful effects DEI can have, Brest told Campus Reform: ”To the extent that you start with the notion that some students are oppressors [or oppressed], or colonizers or colonized, it instills the victim mindset in the people who are colonized, and it obviously pits students who are identified as oppressors against those who are oppressed.”
