At MIT debate, DEI defenders concede diversity policies can make ‘things worse’

By Maggie Kelly

The College Fix

Aug 6, 2023


‘DEI is derailed when activists say men who want to be women are equal to women and allow those men access to women’s hard-earned rights,’ pro-DEI scholar says


CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — The resolution “Academic DEI programs should be abolished” drew a large crowd to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday evening as four scholars debated the hot-button issue in front of nearly 300 people.


Despite disagreement on the fundamental value of DEI, both sides agreed on the flawed or misguided nature of many diversity programs.


Pamela “Denise” Long, CEO of DEI consulting organization YouthCentrix, defended preferential treatment for American descendants of slaves but said DEI has in some ways been hijacked by activists representing other interests. “[American] Negros should forever have a special relationship with our nation that enslaved us since 1776,” Long (pictured, right) said.


“We are those folk who endured a hundred years of abhorrent, unimaginable, unconstitutional discrimination until 1960, and those of us who have continuously experienced disproportionate negative impact of social policy even until today,” she said. However, “DEI makes things worse when advocates attempt to shoehorn the ambitions of all people onto the backs of U.S. slaves and our legacy,” Long said.


“DEI is derailed when activists say men who want to be women are equal to women and allow those men access to women’s hard-earned rights,” Long continued. “DEI is derailed when they say that ‘minor-attracted people’ is just a sexual preference. … To hook that to our legacy as slaves is wrong and egregious.”


Karith Foster, diversity consultant with INVERSITY solutions, also spoke on the importance of DEI, but had strong words about many of its existing programs. “DEI is necessary,” said Foster (left, in purple). “When done well, lives can be transformed and transported to an infinitely better place. When DEI is done poorly — and let’s be blatantly honest, it’s taken a left turn — it creates insurmountable barriers of fear, mistrust, vengeance and indifference.”


However, “looking to eradicate an effort, as badly as it’s been done, is not an answer either,” Foster continued. “We need to reform DEI and all our conversations and programs around it.”


DEI ideas are ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ McGill professor countered


“Diversity, equity and inclusion sound wonderful,” chemist and McGill University Professor Pat Kambhampati, who argued for the abolition of academic DEI programs, said at the opening of the debate. “But these ideas are a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”


“Let’s begin with equity,” said Kambhampati (below left). “Equity involves redistribution of resources from me to you.”


“We had economic Marxism a century ago,” he said. “Now in Cambridge in [the 2020s], we have cultural Marxism.”


Heather Mac Donald, author and Manhattan Institute fellow, spoke up forcefully in favor of DEI program abolition. Mac Donald serves on the College Fix Advisory Board. “A university’s task is the pursuit of truth,” Mac Donald said. “The DEI bureaucracy is founded on a lie. A lie which teaches students to think of themselves as victims and to see racism where none exists. It [creates] through racial preferences the very divisions and discomforts that it purports to solve in an endless vicious cycle.”


“Campus diversity bureaucrats … suck up vast sums of money, narrow the acceptable range of discourse, and force the adoption of double standards of achievement. Universities should embrace a single, colorblind version of academic excellence. It will only do so however by eliminating DEI fiefdoms and by replacing identity with merit as the touchstone of academic accomplishment.”


Nonetheless, “it is the academic skills gap which gives rise to the entire academic diversity apparatus,” Mac Donald later elaborated in an email to The Fix.


The purpose of that apparatus is to re-cast the inevitable academic struggles of students admitted with large racial preferences into struggles with racism,” Mac Donald said. “Nothing a DEI administrator does can possibly solve the academic skills gap problem, which begins to manifest itself in the earliest years of a child’s life. Even were DEI administrators remotely competent to solve that problem, which they manifestly are not, they enter the picture 14 years too late.”


The debate was uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday night and has been viewed approximately 4,200 times as of Wednesday.


The auditorium, which seats almost 300 people, was nearly full. A quiet and attentive crowd allowed the event to proceed undisturbed. Nadine Strossen, professor emerita at New York Law School and past president of the ACLU, moderated the debate.


Organizers said they were “delighted” at how the event proceeded, economist and co-organizer Eric Rasmusen wrote in an April 5 email to The Fix.


“No police were present, no threats were made, and the debate and audience questioning proceeded respectfully— though not because the debaters didn’t stake out their positions in very strong and opposing terms,” he said.


Approximately 100 MIT scholars, include several DEI deans, were asked to participate in the debate, but all declined or did not respond except for one professor, The College Fix reported last month. None of the panelists, pro or anti-DEI, were formally affiliated with the university.


The event was hosted by the university’s Adam Smith Society and MIT Free Speech Alliance. Fifteen other organizations also co-sponsored the debate, including American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism and the Alumni Free Speech Alliance.


At MIT debate, DEI defenders concede diversity policies can make ‘things worse’ | The College Fix

Where Liberty and Learning Endure

June 29, 2026
As America commemorates 250 years of independence, we reflect on the enduring principles of liberty and learning that have defined Davidson College for nearly two centuries.

Bankruptcy and Higher Education

June 21, 2026
By Todd Zywicki The Wall Street Journal June 21, 2026 Auburn University is known for its agricultural and STEM programs, its flight school and athletic programs. But the land-grant university recently became notable for another reason: The board of trustees is taking control of the school back from its faculty. The board began seizing the university’s academic programs—including curriculum, course offerings, degree requirements and academic credentials—at its June 5 meeting. The board also dissolved the faculty senate and replaced it with an advisory council to the president, which includes two faculty members from each of the university’s colleges and additional members appointed by the president. The board’s assertion of authority mirrors incoming mandates by the Alabama Legislature restricting the role of faculty senates in the state’s public university system. Predictably, Auburn’s faculty has responded with howls of outrage, decrying these intrusions on the faculty’s authority over academic operations. How could outsiders appointed through a political process have the expertise to make such delicate decisions? I’ve been a professor at a state university for almost 30 years, and I am sympathetic up to a point. But before becoming a professor I was a bankruptcy lawyer. And bankruptcy law teaches an important lesson for how academia can respond to this moment. Bankruptcy gives businesses an opportunity to admit mistakes, reform and emerge stronger. Successful enterprises don’t need bankruptcy lawyers. But when an enterprise loses its way, it goes into receivership. Most universities aren’t financially bankrupt but have lost their mission and direction. Society has long recognized certain institutions’ authority to manage their own affairs. Two notable examples are licensed professionals—such as doctors and lawyers—and universities. Universities, even state universities, have run their enterprises with minimal external oversight. Faculties enjoyed substantial rights of self-governance because they committed to higher standards than those required by ordinary jobs. Professors would establish and maintain standards of scholarly integrity, freedom of speech and inquiry, and rigorous dedication to merit-based assessment of research in specialized areas. They policed their own house, enforcing norms of truth-seeking, maintaining scholarly integrity and rigor, and ensuring that students emerged with basic knowledge, employable skills and civic competency. But over the past several decades, commitment to those values collapsed. Surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression consistently reveal fear among students and faculty around expressing unfashionable ideas. Universities have seen shout-downs, cancellations and even violence against speakers. Merit and quality yielded to “diversity” and “equity.” Truth-seeking has been displaced by faddish theories and ideologically charged teaching and research. Professors design esoteric departments and teach niche classes to cliques of activist students while the needs of other students and taxpayers for real education go unaddressed. Like companies I represented, universities have lost their way. And many have proved either unable or unwilling to self-correct. When that happens, it is appropriate to put institutions into receivership until they reform and rededicate themselves to their mission. At Auburn incoming students must now take certain required civics and history courses to master basic competency in U.S. history and government. To ensure the classes actually meet that objective, professors will have to make their syllabi publicly available. In the classroom, instructors will be expected to stick to the matter at hand and avoid free-ranging political punditry. Just as other companies can learn from the ones that go bankrupt, other institutions of higher education can learn something from Auburn: Fix what’s broken, or someone else might fix it for you. Mr. Zywicki is a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. He was a Dartmouth College trustee, 2005-09. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bankruptcy-and-higher-education-4c2b178e

Race Preferences Are Falling Nationwide

June 19, 2026
By the Editorial Board The Wall Street Journal June 19, 2026 The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against racial preferences is turning out to be a landmark with profound consequences as its influence spreads. On Thursday the famously progressive Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a state program that issued scholarships based on race violates the U.S. Constitution. Justice Annette Ziegler wrote for the court that the Constitution requires “that every person ‘must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,’” and that the state cannot “use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.” That must have been painful for the activist liberal majority on the court. In a concurrence, Wisconsin Chief Justice Jill Karofsky took some shots at Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College (2023) before acknowledging that “I am bound by the precedent set forth in SFFA” and other Supreme Court rulings “when interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment.” The case was brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty against a 1985 Badger State law that reserved need-based scholarships through a grant program for “Black American,” “American Indian,” “Hispanic” and some Southeast Asian undergraduate students enrolled in Wisconsin’s private and technical colleges. Last week the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a scholarship program earmarked for black University of Iowa students studying physical sciences was “impracticable” under SFFA. State governments would be wise to repeal these discriminatory grant programs, or the courts will do it for them.
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