Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Diversity is a concept that's at ground zero of our political wars in recent years, and my guest today has written a history and a spirited defense of the idea. David Oppenheimer is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a new book titled, “The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea”. Professor Oppenheimer, welcome to the program.
David Oppenheimer: Thank you very much. It's a delight to be here with you.
GR: Well, we really appreciate you making the time. So, I want to set the stage for our listeners by doing one thing myself here, and then I'll start asking you questions. But I wanted to read what you name as the diversity principle, and it's the very first page of your book. And so, it's a short paragraph. I'll read that, and then I'll come in and ask you a question after that. Here's the diversity principle, “People with different backgrounds, experiences and viewpoints benefit from engaging with each other. That's why it's important for people who are insiders to expand their circles to include outsiders, and vice versa. The experience of being an outsider is often influenced by age, religion, ethnicity, gender, race, language, disability, economic class, and other forms of identity. Compared with groups that are more homogeneous, diverse groups do a better job of solving problems, making discoveries, teaching and learning from each other, and improving democratic discourse.” A very good summary I think of an idea that is somewhat slippery at times. So let me ask you this to start, you tell a history of this principle and this idea, where and with whom does your story start?
DO: Well, my story starts with Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the great figures of the German or Prussian Enlightenment and the founder of the University of Berlin in 1810, where he decided to create an experiential university which has become the model for research universities around the world, and decided to include Catholics and Jews in order to benefit from a more diverse learning community.
GR: Interesting, okay. And so, my next question is going to force you to kind of take something that you spend almost 200 pages writing about, but to condense it into a reasonably brief answer. How does this concept then wind its way into higher education more generally? That's the University of Berlin, but where do we go from there?
DO: So, Humboldt influences John Stuart Mill and Charles Eliot, the transformative 19th century president of Harvard University. Eliot takes Humboldt's ideas and applies them at Harvard, and transforms Harvard from a sort of a sleepy college into a great university through bringing in, again, Catholic students and Jewish students and faculty and black people and immigrants and poor people with scholarships. And when he steps down, says that the thing he's most proud of about Harvard is the deep diversity in terms of racial and ethnic and religious and class diversity. And once it becomes part of the DNA of Harvard, it spreads to other American universities, it spreads to free speech law, it spreads to academic freedom law, it spreads to civil law, to civil rights law. And it all carries from there from Humboldt and Mill, or the Mills, to Eliot.
GR: And then in your story, you kind of locate this as you just did in the academy. And, you know, the things that you just articulated are things that we would associate with almost any university in the United States with, you know, a couple of exceptions, I guess. But then how and why does commerce and science come on board this diversity train that was originally put on the tracks by the academy?
DO: Well, businesses figured out the value of diversity through business school professors who were one foot in the university and one foot in the world of commerce. There was this early, very influential article called, ‘From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity’. And once business school professors and then psychology professors started testing the idea that diversity really has measurable value, they found that it did. They found that companies, for example, with more diverse boards and more diverse C-suites and more diverse management, made more money. And that was the point of what they were doing. And scientists, one, began studying diversity in many environments and finding that it really made a difference, and two, finding that in science, in science labs that were more diverse, they were making more important discoveries.
GR: Interesting. And then one of the things that I wanted to see if you had any thoughts about, I was thinking of some of my own discoveries about diversity that I've made along the way, and one of the ones that kind of surprised me when I first came upon it was in the workplace in the United States, you could argue that really one of the biggest leaders is the United States government. That they do quite well in comparison with the private sector. And not only if we think about the military, but the civilian workforce as well. I don't know if you had any comments about that.
DO: Well, one, I completely agree that the U.S. military, has been much more diverse and has done a much better job of creating opportunity for women and for black Americans and Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans than private industry. And then second, yes, the government, all the way back to the reconstruction period, and with the exception of the Wilson administration, which was really terrible toward black federal employees, but with that exception the government has had a more diverse workforce, and has been better at having rules that required employment decisions to be made, looking at a broad pool instead of simply, oh, I've got a friend who could work for us, let's hire him.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is University of California at Berkeley law professor David Oppenheimer, and we're discussing his new book. It's titled, “The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea”. So, you have kind of a two-pronged way of talking about this concept. And it's, you know, the way that it gets argued about. And one is sort of as an issue of fairness and as an issue of justice. But you've also emphasized the fact that, hey, you know, it's not just a good thing to do, it's good for business, it will make you more money. And so there's the self-interested aspect of it from a collective perspective. I was wondering if you had some reflections on, as this concept then is wending its way and becoming more and more accepted in different kinds of realms of our lives, is there an impact back on the concept itself? Does the concept itself go through any formative changes in that process?
DO: Well, it certainly has, from an idea that seemed like a good idea into the business world, where it was very heavily analyzed by the business consultancies who were training, HR people and training businesses and looking for feedback. And that's how we saw the movement from a diversity principle to diversity, equity and inclusion. As businesses concluded and their consultants concluded that they were recruiting a more diverse workforce, but they weren't bringing them into the community of the workforce so that there was no sense of inclusion. And in the absence of inclusion, they weren't fully gaining the benefits of diversity.
GR: Interesting, interesting. And I wanted to pick up on that. You know, you mentioned DEI, it's obviously a, you know, like a flashing neon light political phrase right now. Do you think that this concept has suffered in recent years with what many people perceive as a hyper focus, especially on the left, on gender, race and sexual orientation as the be all and end all of diversity that, you know, has that sort of weakened the strength of the concepts some way, do you think?
DO: Well, certainly it's important that we recognize that there are all kinds of diversity and all kinds of diversity contributes to the diversity effect. So, for example, there's a criticism that American universities are too left.
GR: Yeah, I want to come back to that a bit later, but go ahead.
DO: Okay, Well I'm sorry to jump ahead.
GR: Oh no, it's fine, it's good.
DO: But certainly, I agree and I probably agree more from having studied diversity, that we need conservative voices on our faculties in order to, one, improve our own research as professors, because we're hearing voices that today we're not perhaps hearing enough. And two, improve the teaching of our students. So just as it's important that women's voices be heard, just as it's important that racial minorities be included in the community, just as it's important that people with disabilities be part of the community. I think it's also important that there be political and ideological diversity in order to gain fully the benefits of diversity.
GR: Yeah, I wanted to come back to that. I wanted to ask you a different question, though, might be related to it in a way. And it's about the academy, and it's based in part on my own experience, but you've already alluded to it. In this focus on certain kinds of diversity, there also seems to me to be a return and an embrace of what I thought as a society, we were trying to work away from in the name of diversity, if you will. And that is the notion that the differences between genders, between races are essential, that they are immutable. And that seems to me to go against Martin Luther King's notion of being, for example, judged by the content of one's character rather than the color of one's skin. There is this essential quality being put on that. Not by everyone, but I think it's fair to say by some people in the assumptions that they make. How does that fit with diversity and your principle, does it sort of work against that purpose in some way?
DO: Well, it seems to me that the experience of growing up as a member of a racial minority in America, or the experience of growing up with a disability in America, or the experience of growing up as a woman in America, affects a person's understanding of critical issues. And let me give you an example that I think shows that a commitment to diversity is not a commitment to essentialism.
GR: Okay, great.
DO: One, on our Supreme Court we currently have two black justices. They couldn't disagree more about most issues. Although I have to say no one would accuse me of being anything other than a liberal, and yet I am an enormous admirer of the civil procedure opinions of Justice Clarence Thomas. I teach civil procedure, I teach his opinions with great admiration. But as much as it is true that the two black justices on our court diametrically disagree about almost everything, look at Justice Thomas's opinion in Black v. Virginia, a case in which the then eight white members of the court agreed that burning a cross was a political statement that deserved recognition as a political statement under the First Amendment. And Justice Thomas's eloquent opinion about how burning a cross was not a form of political speech, it was a form of terrorism and intimidation that deserved no recognition under our First Amendment. This was part of his experience growing up as a black man in America, that I don't think any of the white justices on the court, liberal conservative, however you want to describe them, understood.
GR: That's a great example. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with David Oppenheimer. He's a professor at the University of California, Berkeley Law School and the author of a new book titled, “The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea” and we've been discussing the ideas that he raises in the book. Well, I wanted, David, to come back to something that you alluded to before the break, which was the criticism of higher education, that there isn't sufficient diversity of viewpoint or ideological diversity there. And it has struck me more in recent years. I've been in the academy for 30 plus years now, and it seems to me that it is a real problem for DEI and for those that are advocating diversity. I guess I wanted to ask you, do you think that that fact, you and I seem to be in agreement that there isn't a lot of ideological diversity in higher education, or at least that a lot of institutions, mine, Syracuse University, the faculty is overwhelmingly liberal, overwhelmingly Democrat, you know, to the tune of beyond 20 to 1 I think in terms of party identification. I'm sure, well, Berkeley has an international reputation for being on the left. Do you think that this has been a problem for the concept itself? Do you think that this has hurt the notion of diversity?
DO: Yes. I think that if the advocates of diversity policies came from every part of the political spectrum, and I think that if the academy, which has been one of the major sources of the advocacy for diversity policies, represented itself a more diverse political environment, that people would be more open, and particularly conservatives would be more open to considering the value of diversity. And instead, I think what happens is that they try to carve out viewpoint diversity and say, well, viewpoint diversity is a good thing, but other kinds of diversity are not real.
GR: I see. So, that's your criticism of the criticism then.
DO: Right. Well it was, by the way, John Stuart Mill had a great response to that. Mill wrote about that and spoke about it in this remarkable speech at Saint Andrew's, where he was the rector of the college, now university. And he said that it's essential to one's education, that you be exposed to people with different ideas, and what gives people different ideas is their experiences and their backgrounds. And that means that you need to include people from lots of different nationalities and religions in order to gain a diverse and therefore richer education.
GR: Yeah. This one's a big question. Why in the end do you think that this concept, particularly in recent years, is so ripe for attack and exploitation from the right? There's lots of things that conservatives could be upset about, why is this one such a magnet?
DO: The power of the diversity principle is that it encourages us to create greater opportunities for women and for people with disabilities and for black Americans and Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans. And that, I think, is threatening to white men who, and now you can put this two ways, who worry about losing their supremacy is how a liberal would put it. Or, who worry about becoming themselves the victims of discrimination is the way a conservative would put it. But either way, there is this strong sense of self-interest in opposing the lessons of the diversity principle.
GR: Well, let me push you on that a little bit. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Berkeley law professor David Oppenheimer. So, I have heard that response before, and what doesn't fully convince me is how that accounts for the conservative attacks on this principle from people who aren't white males. And there are a lot of them, you know, that self-interested argument, if that's what's driving it at the core. How do you fit that in to that?
DO: One, I dispute that there are a lot of them.
GR: Okay.
DO: If you look at it statistically. And certainly, black conservatives, conservative women, benefit within conservative circles from the fact that they are not white men because they make good spokespeople, because there's this symbolic value. I get that.
GR: Go against type, yeah.
DO: Yeah. But I think if you look at data on who opposes diversity policies, it's mostly white men who are driving this.
GR: Okay.
DO: So that would be my response to that.
GR: Okay. We've got about five minutes or so left, and I want to try to get a little more personal now with some of my questions, if that's okay with you, because you hinted some of those things in your book. One of the blurbs for your book says that you were formerly a skeptic of diversity, now you're a believer. So, tell me quickly, I know you could go into great detail, but why were you previously skeptical? I assume it's more than just the fact that I'm looking at a white man right now.
DO: Oh, yeah, my skepticism came from thinking that this was just sort of a pop psychology excuse for including small numbers of women and minorities and not a principle aimed at creating a more equal and fair society.
GR: Okay. And why did you change your views? What happened?
DO: I discovered the long history and the depth and the thinking of the people who have developed this idea. And the more I read, and the more I studied, both about the history and about the current scientific, empirical data about the power of diversity, the more I realized that this is a real thing and this has to be taken seriously.
GR: When you were doing the research for this book and the writing of it, did you have your own sort of diversity ‘a-ha’ moment in terms of the people that you discovered and you were writing about?
DO: Well, in a sense, in that three women emerged in the history who either I hadn't heard of or I didn't appreciate their significance. And I came to realize that for each of them, they contributed both amazing ideas about diversity, and they contributed diversity to the development of those ideas. And those were Caroline von Humboldt, who was married to Wilhelm von Humboldt and clearly had a major influence on his sense that the world is such a vast place with people who are so different, and that those differences contribute to the power of ideas. And then Harriet Taylor Mill, who for 25 years was John Stuart Mill's companion and lover, and then when her husband died, they married. And she was the co-author of much of his work and the lead author of some of his work, which I hadn't understood. He always said that she was his co-author, but people couldn't believe it because she was a woman. And it's been amazing to see how we have finally, in this century, begun to recognize her importance. And then finally, Pauli Murray, who was probably the most influential civil rights lawyer of the 20th century in the United States, maybe the most influential lawyer in the 20th century in the United States, and the role she had in convincing Thurgood Marshall to take a diversity approach to his arguments in the cases that led to Brown v. Board of Education, to convincing Lady Bird Johnson to get Lyndon Johnson to get the Senate to keep sex discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Her convincing the ACLU to hire Ruth Bader Ginsburg and then convincing her to appreciate the diversity element in the arguments that they constructed together about sex discrimination and the 14th Amendment. And then at the height of this remarkable legal career, and as, I think the first black woman to be made a tenured professor at Brandeis became an Episcopal priest.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That's fascinating, and a really interesting story about how you went through your own story when you were writing the story of this principle. That was David Oppenheimer. And again, his new book is titled, “The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea”, and in the spirit of the book, I will say that whether you agree or disagree with his argument, your understanding of the issue will be enhanced by grappling with it. Professor Oppenheimer, thanks again for talking with me. I really, really appreciate this and really, really learned a lot.
DO: Thank you so much for having me.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
