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Notes -
There seems to be a small movement by Republican lawmakers to put legal pressure on the excesses of woke universities.
The STEM Scott writes about several bills up for consideration in the Texas state senate:
Florida is considering a similar bill, HB 999, that would place restrictions on DEI-related initiatives and majors at public universities. Already the effects are being felt at SLACs like the New College:
I'm in a bit of an odd place with regards to these issues. I don't fit neatly onto the woke "how dare you attack our most hallowed and sacred institutions!" side, nor the anti-woke "stop teaching this pinko commie crap to our kids!" side.
I really do have an almost naive faith in free speech for all, even for my worst enemies. Despite being an avowed rightist, I not only want leftists to be able to speak, but I want them to be platformed! I want to help you get the word out! I think our public life really should play host to a diversity of viewpoints. I think the university should be a hothouse of strange and controversial ideas. By all means, keep teaching CRT and women's studies and black studies and whatever else you want. I know that leftists don't extend the same courtesy to me, but that doesn't invalidate the fundamental point that I should extend that courtesy to them. Even just beyond extending formal charity to my political outgroup, I actually enjoy a lot of this type of scholarship and I find value in it, I like Marxist literary criticism and the obscurantist mid-20th century French guys and German phenomenology and all the rest of it, and I think it should continue to be taught and studied on its own merits, even if I don't necessarily agree with the politics.
But! It really is hard sometimes. When things like this happen, when a book chapter that was, by all accounts, a completely anodyne explication of the official party ideology, whose only crime was that it didn't go far enough in advocating the abolition of all gendered pronouns, is met with public humiliation and a tarnishing of the reputation of the author... it does make my blood boil and it's hard to maintain my principles. It makes me want to go "ok, yeah screw it, ban all liberal arts programs at universities, I don't care, whatever, I just want these people to lose." I'm on their side on a lot of the key object-level issues and I still want them to lose! That's why I constantly feel like I'm of two minds on these questions.
In spite of all the problems with the modern university, I still think it's important that we have at least one institution that acts as a countervailing force to utilitarian profit-maximizing techbroism. The university as it stands now leaves a lot to be desired. But if the choice is between the university we have now, or nothing, I'll stick with the university.
I don't have an opinion on tenure, and I lean on the side of thinking that legislation ought not to interfere with the operations of even public universities to the extent of banning it. Likewise, I'm not sure that legislation ought to specifically compel firings of professors spreading odious views, including "belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief." As described by Aaronson, the professor would have to at least attempt to "compel" this belief, but that could mean something as innocuous as stating it in class and winking, for all I know. I don't know if setting the precedent for such legislative micromanaging causes more harm than good.
But for SB17, as described by Aaronson:
seems like a very straightforward implementation of the first amendment religion clause. DEI is clearly a religion, a specifically and openly faith-based worldview with certain morals that follow downstream of that faith, and much like how public universities ought not push Christianity or Islam on its faculty or students, it ought not push DEI on them either. The devil's in the details, I suppose, since public universities certainly can make accommodations for religions including having services, and maybe this law might go too far. I would think that such a specific law wouldn't even be required, though, since the Constitution already covers this.
I see where you’re coming from, but disagree that DEI is a religion. Or, at least, not “specifically and openly” one.
It obviously has moral claims, and distinguishes between right and wrong. But this is not unique to religions. Take something from my line of work. People get really into Agile. Your scrum master will tell you there is a right way and a wrong way to plan a sprint. He will ask that you participate in self-effacing rituals. Comply, he will warn, lest your team falter under a backlog of your sins. In doing so, he will have the blessing of the company—presumably because someone had good marketing and a couple of case studies.
And you know what? Agile is a bit cultish. It has hierarchies and rituals and, God, it has evangelists. But this is not sufficient religious character to bar it on First Amendment grounds. From Cornell Law:
Agile clearly fits neither. It offers answers about workflow and planning, not cosmology or morality. Its duties are purely materialistic. Likewise, DEI does not attempt to answer any of these comprehensive questions. It anchors the assignment of duties to material benefits like “diverse viewpoints” or “not alienating talent.” Failing both prongs of the religious definition, DEI is secular in nature.
It seems like it would cover Buddhist, Hindu, and maybe Confucian thought.
The Unitarians definitely push the limits, to the point where the government occasionally questions their tax exemption. Even internally, they struggle with how much Christianity to include. UUs do have covenants and principles. I suspect that those would be dispositive in any case where UUs’ religious character was in question. For a practitioner to try and claim religious exemption, there would have to be some conflict with “fundamental questions.”
Do you have an alternate, better definition in mind?
My understanding of Confucianism was that it’s got a lot to do with the “mandate of heaven” answer to is/ought problems. Looking it up, I guess that predated Confucius by several centuries, and I might have confused it with other threads in Chinese philosophy. There are still some spiritual features which DEI lacks:
But it’s clear that I’m not familiar enough, so I guess I’ll punt.
I would agree with your formulation of the problem, and I’m trying to avoid splitting little hairs. Appealing to legal definitions was my attempt to describe the “similar-enough place in thought and practitioners’ lives.”
It’s not enough to say that DEI feels cultish, because so do a lot of other decidedly-secular business practices. Neither is having a code of behavior—that’s not unique to religion. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are secular values, so policy made in their service is secular. Insofar as DEI cites similar principles, I think it rates as secular, too.
Extreme cases are surely capable of leaving that umbrella. By citing Christian metaphysics, Ms. Higgenbotham has no pretense of secularity. You can’t accept her argument without accepting some of the axioms of Christianity. That doesn’t prevent coming at similar proscriptions from a secular background.
While there is a religious Confucianism that expands on his approval of religious ritual and rites (he having lived in a period of widespread animist belief), Confucius himself was (and the Confucian classics more generally are) quite humanistic. Essentially all instruction and rhetoric is based on the physical; references to the supernatural are vague and nonspecific; and the few references to 天命 (usually translated in most contexts to Mandate of Heaven) in the Analects are moreso appeals to some sort of spiritual/natural/moral law (as you noted).
I suppose you could say it’s spiritual in that sense, but given the teachings are entirely preoccupied with human and not divine action, and the classics themselves are uninterested in discussing the supernatural beyond acknowledging the native animism and ancestor worship of the time, …I guess it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, but clucks like a chicken?
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I did not write that DEI is "specifically and openly" a religion. I wrote that it's "a specifically and openly faith-based worldview with certain morals that follow downstream of that faith." The ingenuousness of it is that it's a religion that wins over people who have largely been inoculated against religions thanks to our modern secular culture. But perhaps it's more correct to say that DEI is a specific practice of a religion, in the same way that Baptism or praying to Mecca 5x a day aren't religions in themselves, but specific practices of Christianity and Islam, respectively.
Alright, but does it fit that definition? Either DEI or whatever parent religion you would say it represents.
I don’t think so. The comprehensiveness and the “fundamental questions” are missing. It gets closer to “duties of conscience,” but anchors them in materialism.
I think in practice it's comprehensive enough and addresses fundamental questions, particularly about how we humans relate to one another, and one of its great innovations is in doing so in practice while having the actual written-down tenets not actually look like they're as comprehensive and totalizing as they are. Likewise, I think, at best, one can say that its duties of conscience are anchored in something that has a veneer of materialism, but underneath that veneer is a fundamentally faith-based belief in immaterial forces that guide human relationships. And even if we could quibble about just how comprehensive it is, I think the fact that it is fundamentally anchored to a faith such that its tenets exist necessarily downstream from that faith makes it fit the category of "religion" for the purposes of limiting the US government's promotion of it. I objected to public schools teaching intelligent design on this basis.
But IANAL, so perhaps I'm mistaken on exactly how US 1st Amendment gets applied. If so, this seems like a massive hole in the law; if faith-based cults can get government sponsorship just by not being sufficiently comprehensive in their tenets, this would provide a mechanism by which the US government would be allowed to promote virtually any religious view. Perhaps what we're observing right now in real-time is a religion that has managed to exploit this security hole and US society and legislators scrambling to patch it before the exploit causes too much harm.
I have a hard time seeing it as a veneer of materialism. The “immaterial forces” are something like justice or fairness. I think those have a pretty solid foundation in materialism.
Compare to American civic religion, which is grounded in various enlightenment values. But the government is allowed to cite life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, because they’re fundamentally material.
(Though…the whole “endowed by their Creator” thing raises some questions.)
So when DEI asserts that something is good because it is “fair,” it’s grounded in a material value rather than a spiritual one. You don’t have to subscribe to any particular metaphysics or doctrine to recognize fairness as a value. It’s too useful for bargaining and cooperation, so it shows up again and again in secular contexts.
Maybe this is just plausible deniability. @desolation had an example extremist who was explicitly grounding DEI rhetoric in religious principles. I don’t have a problem with banning that from government speech. For the average advocate, though, I don’t see what immaterial grounds are being used.
I was actually referring to "oppression" (or "systemic -ism" or "patriarchy" or "white supremacy" or other similar terms). It's certainly the same word as one that's used to refer to a real concept with a solid foundation in materialism, but as used by the religion in question, it refers to an essentially magical concept due to how it is claimed to have impacts on interactions between individuals, while lacking the sort of scientific backing to support such claims. Again, I think this is ingenious for its ability to convince otherwise secular/materialist people of this supernatural force, but it is a veneer, and scratching the surface reveals that it's magical thinking that fundamentally rests on faith, not dissimilar to a belief in an omnipotent God that works in mysterious ways.
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I think proponents of this law would disagree, and point at the fairly clear examples of "good and evil" and "duties of conscience" appearing in the relevant canon. Although you have a point that DEI lacks a unified view of meanings for life and death.
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Public universities are creatures of the state. Why should the legislature not supervise them?
Part of what makes a University a University and not something else is a degree of self-government. An institution that teaches a 13-16th grade curriculum determined by the politicians and/or bureaucrats in the sponsoring Education Ministry may be doing something valuable, but it isn't continuing the tradition that began with those communities of scholars in Paris, Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge in the High Middle Ages.
FWIW, I don't think that the legislature abolishing tenure (something that happened long ago in the UK without causing serious problems) or regulating non-classroom DEI initiatives gets close to the point where it turns a public University into a Even Higher School. But (for example) a law prohibiting the teaching of books by paedophiles would be pushing the boundary.
SB16 seems different, in that if it is enforced as written, it prevents the University teaching that correct social, political or religious beliefs are superior to incorrect ones. An organisation where the curriculum is subject to government sanitisation to remove controversial topics is not a University.
Surely "teaching that correct social, political or religious beliefs are superior to incorrect ones" is antithetical to a modern university? Is a university a church now?
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What's "correct social, political or religious beliefs"?
Anyway, let's imagine a fantastical situation. A group of Nazi scientists (and I mean hardcore Nazis with all accompanying beliefs) from parallel universe gets into today's America and by some means (e.g. by temporarily hiding their beliefs) manages to take over a small Higher Education institution (still bearing the title of University because it's good for PR) in some state. They proceed with a program to find smart youth of proper Aryan background and indoctrinate them and educate them in sciences (let's assume they are really good scientists) and thus make sure only devoted Aryan scientists fully on board with Nazi ideology can be professors in this establishment. They teach all the usual scientific stuff, but with a Nazi bent, and also have a variety of more specific courses, like how Jews are evil, how homosexuality is ruinous for civilization, how to scientifically figure out people's worth depending on their genetics, which genetical defects can be cured and which should be exterminated, maybe the history of Aryan races and Aryan culture, maybe even a course on Nitzche and Wagner (with some appropriate bent of course), etc.
Now, let's say they are not particularly hiding it, and the citizens of the state discover they have a full blown Nazi University in the middle of the state, supported by their tax dollars, participating in career fairs, inviting their schoolchildren to campus tours, publishing their own newspaper (with appropriate graphics of course), holding their big celebration on April 20 each year, and so on, you get the picture. Do you think the good people of this state would say "well, it's a University, and they are technically not doing anything against the law - sure, the stuff they are teaching sounds vile to us, but we can't subject them to governmental sanitization, that wouldn't be University anymore!" Or, do you think they'd grab torches and pitchforks and would demand to raze it all to the ground, and would destroy any politician that would object to that? Or would they do something in between - like find any legal means, however tortured and far-reaching, to destroy this outlet without technically violating the law and committing outright violence, maybe?
And if you think people would not tolerate a Nazi University - what set of principles would you propose that would be consistent with that, but also with your ideal of a University as something completely and utterly independent and subject to no outside control whatsoever?
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Isn't that essentially what it is at this point? It's not like there's much room for dissent, or that 90% of the people going aren't just there to get a degree to get A Good Job. The tradition is already pretty much dead.
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Then we definitely shouldn't have state-funded universities in the US, because it is not the job of any organ of the state to teach its citizens correct religious or political beliefs.
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And what are the "correct social, political or religious beliefs" that the University should be teaching are superior?
By this definition Universities have not existed for some time, since they are already subject to a variety of restrictions and mandates from the government explicitly intended to shape their attitude and expression of "controversial topics". It is already well-established that "controversial" expressions cause harm to the vulnerable, and so must be carefully cordoned off if not suppressed entirely. It is already well-established that specific words make people unsafe; now we are simply picking which words those are. How is this remotely objectionable to anyone who supports the Universities as they currently exist?
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So the public must fund these institutions but have no say so that they can continue in the tradition of historic universities? That’s an incomplete argument especially given that we have numerous private universities.
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They should, and they 100% have the legal power to, AFAIK. But not all supervision is reasonable, and at some point it can go into micromanagement territory that does more harm than good. E.g. legislators could theoretically explicitly mandate by law that the trash collector must wear shoes that have 8 shoelace holes on odd-numbered days and 10 shoelace holes on even-numbered days, since trash collectors are employees of the state, but that would be a ridiculous level of micromanagement, and most people would agree that legislators drafting laws to that effect and specificity would do more harm than good. I lean towards believing that the legislature having specific mandates about tenure in public universities is micromanagement rather than reasonable supervision, though I'm not strong in this belief.
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