DEI<UHD

A framework for diversity

Until the Universities Tests Act of 1871, teaching staff and students at English universities were required to subscribe the 39 Articles of Religion. No such tests of doctrinal allegiance remain in this more enlightened age, of course. Though, if you have perused any university job advertisements recently, you may have noticed they tend to demand assent, preferably enthusiastic, to their Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies.

Some wags have impishly reordered the acronym to DIE. Subtle it is not, nor likely to prove a winner in the Countdown anagram round. Those of more military bent might look at DEI with the same suspicion as an IDE. The Latinist, though, might be content to leave it as it is and simply translate it: “of God,” a genitive of origin, for so it sometimes seems to be treated. Left to stand alone, it does indeed risk taking on the qualities of a golden calf.

But let’s not be too swift in throwing out the image with the idol. Diversity, equality and inclusion are not, I would suggest, goods in their own right. There is nothing intrinsically good about everyone being utterly different, everything being treated as though they were exactly the same, and everyone being welcomed to join everything. Jokes about a nun in a brothel notwithstanding, one may think of good counterexamples to each.

Even so, diversity, equality and inclusion certainly can be very good things. But, I would counsel, only if they are properly framed. Rather than playing anagrams, I want tentatively to offer another trigrammatic acronym as a vessel for the redemption of DEI: namely, UHD, or Unity, Hierarchy and Discernment.

Unity>Diversity

Diversity logically presupposes a degree of unity, since there can be no diversity within any category of things (in this case, people) without a recognition of the unifying commonality which makes it a category in the first place: you cannot have unqualified diversity among people, because they all share in the unifying quality of being people. This may seem an unnecessary thing to say. As the transhumanist fringe starts to become more mainstream, we may find it requires reiteration.

But even now, at the more specific level of that group of people who make up, say, the collegiate body of a university, attention must be paid to what unifies that group before the appropriate level of diversity can be defined. The same caveat applies to any membership body, including the nation state.

This is a matter of simple truth. There are certain characteristics which prevent someone from becoming a member of a university fellowship. Someone who, for any number of reasons, hereditary or social, is incapable of a certain level of thought is already excluded from consideration. Within universities, this is generally, though one may suspect not entirely fairly, measured in terms of degrees earned. Already, diversity yields to a certain unity of purpose within the body concerned. It is therefore untrue of a university to claim that it seeks diversity as an end in itself.

Any given university or other membership body already assumes a certain unifying purpose which limits the diversity it can tolerate internally. In what that unifying purpose consists is a matter which should be open to question. It may be sheer academic prowess according to the utilitarian metrics of papers published, degrees awarded and students satisfied. If that is the case, then it would be honest for the given institution to say so. If, however, the university body is using the buzzword “diversity” as the means of instituting a certain unity of political thought to which other ideals must be subordinated, it should be equally honest in that assertion, and equally open to challenge. What seems to happening instead is that certain bodies use the term precisely as a means of suppressing diversity of thought and imposing an unchallenged narrative which will brook no dissent: perhaps not so different from the old religious tests, after all.

Hierarchy>Equality

Few nowadays will vaunt the merits of inequality. But to assert the merits of its opposite is to invite the question: equality in what? In outcome? In opportunity? In pay? In rights to walk across the college lawn? Any attempts to answer these questions result in a number of inevitable caveats against the purported principle. The reason is that equality per se is neither desirable nor achievable. Nor is equality per se good.

If diversity of a body is predicated, as I have claimed, on unity of purpose, then that unity of purpose and the diversity which contributes towards its achievement precludes equality. Some members of the body will play a greater role in the achievement of the unifying purpose. This is not to say that any member is unnecessary. The domestic and grounds staff are as necessary to the running of a university as the professors. Students cannot study if they cannot eat or are perpetually beset by E Coli from unsanitary ablutions.

The difference is this: university could not exist without its non-academic staff; but the university would not exist without its academic staff. The latter are of its essence, closer to its telos, more highly skilled, less easily replaced. In any body, there are members which are higher and lower in relation to the unifying telos of the whole. A corporate body can no more function without a head than can a human body. One might not like it, but could just about function with prosthetic toes or limbs, even an artificial lung or heart. But at time of writing, nobody has conceived of a working prosthetic brain.

As soon as we speak of higher and lower members of a body, we are talking about a hierarchy. No amount of buddying up with first-name terms can hide the fact that within a university, as within any functioning body, there are inequalities. Further, those inequalities are necessary for the body to function. The professor of Law does not decide the dishwashing rota, and has no right to dictate it. Likewise, the dining room manager does not decide on the academic policies of the college. Nor, though, are these priorities of equal weight in the life of the university. Mistakes in one arena will cost less than those in the other. They will have a greater impact upon every other member of that body. Therefore, those members of the body which are less closely ordered to its unifying purpose owe their existence within the body to those which are closer to it.

It would be possible to create a collegiate body as a genuine community of equals, but to do so, you would have to sacrifice diversity. You would need to fire all the domestic and support staff and delegate all their work on rotation to students and academics, who would receive the same stipends, eat the same food and so on. It would make for an interesting experiment, almost monastic in its way. Whether it would be good for people to associate only with their equals, and whether such a system would be germane to the unifying purpose of the institution, are matters which would remain to be seen. I suspect that some degree of hierarchy would have to emerge among teachers and students to make it work, and know from experience that hidden hierarchies have the potential to be far more exploitative than open and obvious ones. I remain sceptical of workplace equality, regarding it as a potentially very damaging delusion, which allows those who wield soft power to deny their responsibilities and errors. If we are all equal, we are all equally to blame when things go wrong.

Within a clear, transparent hiearchy, though, one can have a certain kind of equality that the matey approach is liable to elide. One can treat people with equal respect, as individual members equally necessary to the body according to their ability and station, even while their work differs in the degree of necessity to that body’s aim. To paraphrase the Apostle, one does not cut off the hand because it is not an eye.

Hands are for work, but they are also for kissing. Lest I be accused of inspiring unwanted physical contact, I do not mean this literally. But I do mean that people should enjoy an equality of honour for their labour. A good hierarchy allows people to be honoured for excelling at their part within the body, rather than being measured by such external and abstract criteria as wealth or repute. A hierarchy allows for all its members to be equally honoured in proportion to the value of their specific role, whatever the relative value of their contribution to the entire body.

Discernment>Inclusion

I really wanted to make this last D stand for “discrimination” in the old-fashioned sense (“a discriminating intellect”), but its use is nowadays so pejorative that I thought better of it. “Discernment,” anyway, owns a nobler ecclesiastical pedigree.

The integrity of any body can be maintained only by excluding certain things from it. Blood cells work to exclude viruses, skin and bone to exclude foreign objects. No body naturally strives to include that which it harmful to itself, unless the harm comes in disguise, like the devil in the garb of an angel of light. The thirsty lips may sip cyanide from a honey-rimmed cup, unless the nose discerns the scent of almonds first.

Likewise, any corporate body must discern what it can include and what it must exclude for its own self-preservation and harmony. Inclusion per se is incompatible with diversity-in-unity and equality-in-hierarchy, because elements which would compromise either of these must necessarily be excluded. A university can be inclusive only to the extent that it excludes members who would hinder progress towards its unifying purpose. Discernment must therefore be prerequisite to inclusion, and unity of purpose prerequisite to discernment. This, too, is a hierarchy of needs.

What might be the practical effects of subordinating DEI to UHD? If, in the end, DEI exists for the sake of treating people with generosity and respect, ensuring that people are paid properly for the job that they are doing, and making sure that members are not harrassed or made unwelcome because of who they are or what they profess, one might think that UHD is unnecessary. But for three reasons, I would argue that it offers an essential complement and corrective.

First, DEI can be weaponised to exclude conservative candidates, religious or otherwise, from university posts, militating towards a monopoly on permissible political perspectives, and the outright bullying of nonconformist staff and students.

Second, DEI can be so weaponised because it is presented as an autonomous, self-evident set of truths which are unrelated to the telos of the institution and not open to discussion even by academics for fear of ostracism.

Third, DEI policy enforcement puts undue power in the hands of university bureaucrats, namely HR departments, in defining and policing the ethos of the institution, which should be determined by its academic and, where applicable, religious unifying telos: instead, managers end up usurping the proper hierarchy and imposing their own questionable political targets.

If I ever find myself in a job interview again, and am asked about my commitment to diversity, equality and inclusion, I suppose that I can answer, “yes - as long as it conforms to unity, hierarchy and discernment.” But I fear my answer might make me seem a bit too diverse for inclusion.