Daniel Shuchman Richard Bernstein Warned Us About DEI The late New York Times journalist was troubled by university leaders’ weak commitment to free expression and intellectual diversity.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/richard-bernstein-dei-universities-dictatorship-of-virtue
Decades before terms like “virtue signaling,” “anti-racism,” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” became ubiquitous, one author foresaw how they would come to dominate American universities and other elite institutions. Richard Bernstein, an esteemed New York Times journalist whose career spanned assignments from Europe to China, died last month at 80.
Among his books was Dictatorship of Virtue: How Multiculturalism is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, Our Lives (1994, updated 1995). In it, Bernstein identified these concepts in their early stages. He acknowledged the appeal of these ideas, which could sound like aspirations for “a fuller realization of American pluralism.” But over time, he argued, they evolved into an intolerant political program which makes people afraid to say what they truly think. Bernstein predicted that this political movement, which he called the “new consciousness,” would reshape American culture, deepen polarization, and ultimately spark a fierce backlash—one with its own potential perils.
As Bernstein’s reporting makes clear, feckless leadership and rigid quasi-religious ideologies are nothing new at American universities. While his focus in Dictatorship of Virtue is the University of Pennsylvania, Bernstein insists that Penn was “fairly typical” of other elite universities, where “diversity training [had become] an exercise in the advancement of radical political ideology.”
Bernstein chronicles Penn’s diversity bureaucracy in its infancy. As early as 1989, the university had a Diversity Planning Committee. When one of its members had the poor judgment to write a memo attesting to his “deep regard for the individual and . . . desire to protect the freedom of all members of society,” an administrator warned him that use of the word individual “is a RED FLAG phrase today which is considered by many to be RACIST.” The Penn Women’s Center, a branch of the provost’s office ostensibly meant to serve all female students, maintained an official “pro-choice” position on abortion, notwithstanding the many thousands of women on Penn’s campus. Presumably not all of them shared a uniform view on such a contentious issue. Clearly, diverse opinion was not in the lexicon of Penn’s diversity officers.
Penn’s campus culture, Bernstein reports, was similarly intolerant of dissent. In 1993, after a student penned controversial op-eds in the Daily Pennsylvanian opposing affirmative action and criticizing Martin Luther King’s character, the author was investigated by Penn’s Judicial Inquiry Office for racial harassment for his opinions. A student mob destroyed thousands of copies of the newspaper. After months of dithering, the judicial body took no action, save reprimanding the police who responded to the vandalism of the newspapers. As many students, professors, heckled speakers, and others would learn in subsequent years, “in the era of political correctness and craven university administrations, the charge of racism, unsubstantiated but accompanied by a few demonstrations . . . suffices to paralyze a campus, to destroy a reputation and to compel an administration into submission.”
Bernstein also presaged the double standards universities have applied in their recent treatment of Jewish students—tolerating language and protests that would be unacceptable if directed at other groups. He even offered a glimpse into the ideological origins of certain protestors after Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. Bernstein reported extensively on an imbroglio in the Brookline, Massachusetts school system in which the Advanced Placement European history course was replaced with a course called “World in Crisis.” The course, as one parent told Bernstein, imparted the unmistakable conclusion to students that “Britain, America and Israel” were the “major oppressor nations of the world.”
The author was especially troubled by university leaders’ lack of courage and their weak commitment to free expression and intellectual diversity. Liz Magill—the former Penn president who lost her job after the wave of anti-Semitic disruptions and encampments on her campus—seems unlikely to have read Bernstein’s prophetic warning:
“Universities need good sheriffs, Gary Cooper figures, who will be friendly and dependable but who will stand in front of the jailhouse door and tell the angry mob that he is the law in this town. . . . Instead there is a reflex toward sanctimony, an impulse toward appeasement, even when things get truly out of hand. The plain fact is that [activist and militant students] know they have universities on the run.”
While the diversity-training industrial complex had seemingly permeated nearly every aspect of American life by the early 2020s, Bernstein showed that DEI entrepreneurs were hard at work even when Ibram X. Kendi was still a child. “The diversity movement has in good capitalist fashion produced an entirely new sensitivity industry,” he wrote, marketed through conferences, on-site training sessions, and slick video productions. Diversity bureaucrats, he predicted, would never lose their jobs—and would have a vested interest in keeping conflict alive.
President Trump probably has not read Bernstein’s book either. But one can’t help but speculate that some of the incidents the author recounts may well have made an impression on the future president at the time. They could help explain his focus on what might otherwise appear to be obscure targets of his dismantling of DEI in the public sector. These included a Federal Aviation Administration-mandated sensitivity training for air-traffic controllers that was so absurdly sexually charged (men were forced to run a gauntlet of female fondling) one can’t conceive of it even as an episode of The Office. And there was the proposed Smithsonian Institution exhibit, floated in 1995, that appeared to condemn the United States for using atomic bombs at the end of World War II, while scarcely mentioning Japan’s brutality and responsibility for launching the war in the first place. Meanwhile, Penn’s then-president Sheldon Hackney, fresh off his own campus disruptions, was rewarded by President Clinton with the Chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
These events, and the ideology driving them, had dire implications, Bernstein believed. “We are going to be a nation ever more fractured along group lines,” he wrote, “with each group supposedly grounded not only in its own separate interest but in its own separate but equal culture.” At risk would be what has allowed us “to achieve our status as a unified and functioning nation,” which could lead to “calamity.”
Bernstein called for “true liberals” to recapture the moral high ground. They should reject demagogues and their slogans, he said, and “reaffirm the greatest engine of genuine diversity that the world has ever known.” As in past ideological struggles, they would need to uphold “democracy and liberty as paramount principles” even in the face of pressures from purists who considered themselves the most “virtuous.”
Bernstein left us with one other warning. He feared that the eventual rebellion against identity politics, which he speculated might have begun with the Republican landslide in the 1994 congressional election, could bring new dangers if it was based on its own sense of grievance, victimization, and group identity. Now that the legal, moral, and political foundations of multiculturalism are finally beginning to crumble, those same “paramount principles” must guide us more than ever.
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