Is DEI Killing Campus Free Speech?
Presentation delivered at the 2023 FIRE Faculty Network Conference
In October 2023, I delivered a presentation at FIRE’s Faculty Network Conference summarizing my research into how DEI bureaucracies shape campus speech environments. This talk served as the foundation for an article I published with Heterodox Academy in December 2023 (entitled, “Is DEI Causing the ‘Crisis of Free Speech’ on Campus?). In that piece, I showed that universities with larger DEI bureaucracies were less tolerant of conservative speakers and more supportive of disruptive actions to prevent campus speech.
There were many analyses I could not include in my Heterodox Academy blog post. Most importantly, I was unable to show that universities with larger DEI bureaucracies have more student self-censorship, more student discomfort with discussing controversial ideas, and more skepticism about the administration’s commitment to speech.
Below, I present this evidence and the entirety of the slides from my presentation:
Between the publishing of Lukianoff and Haidt’s Coddling of the American Mind in 2015 and the summer of 2020 there was a lively debate on the question whether there was a “free speech crisis” on college campuses. While some argued that “cancel culture” was destroying free expression on campus, others dismissed concerns about college free speech as a “moral panic.”
By 2023, however, most observers were willing to admit that the “campus free speech crisis” was not just a “myth.” As Voice of America put it, “Everyone Agrees Campus ‘Free Speech’ is in Crisis.”
But why was there a “crisis” of free speech on college campuses? The most popular arguments (e.g. Lukianoff and Haidt) centered on the idea that Gen Z’s unique political, cultural, emotional and/or psychological characteristics made them intolerant of speech.
But these accounts cannot help us identify why the “crisis” of campus free speech is not evenly distributed across places. While some universities find themselves in the news constantly for controversies connected to speech, others do not.
The cross-campus variation in campus free speech environments has led to a focus on factors internal to the university. Most notably, campus observers have started linking DEI efforts on campus to the ever-worsening “crisis” of college free speech. Consider Abbot and Marinovic in Newsweek:
Lawrence Krauss struck a similar tone in the Wall Street Journal:
More recently, high-profile conflicts over campus speech have involved DEI administrators as central players. Federal Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech at Stanford Law School was quite literally blocked by DEI (in the form of a DEI director):
Additionally, Claudine Gay’s response to speech conflicts at Harvard was immediately linked to the DEI bureaucracy:
The assumed link between the free speech crisis and the rise of DEI is curious. From a naïve perspective, what could be so wrong about institutional support for “diversity, equity and inclusion”? The mystery only deepens when one examines university DEI department websites. Consider the University of Michigan’s DEI page. After reading this, it would not be unreasonable to expect that the increasing size and significance of university DEI bureaucracies might significantly improve the speech climates on college campuses.
So we are left with an empirical question: are larger DEI bureaucracies really associated with worse campus speech climates?
The first challenge in answering this question is to measure DEI across campuses. In order to do this, I follow the approach spelled out in Greene and Paul’s 2021 paper, “Diversity University: DEI Bloat in the Academy.”
Greene and Paul measured the size of DEI bureaucracies at 65 “Power 5” universities:
Using keyword searches, Greene and Paul were able to identify how many employees are devoted to DEI efforts across each of their “Power 5” universities:
Greene and Paul find that universities employ an average of 45 DEI employees. In their words, “Promoting DEI has become a primary function of universities.”
Greene and Paul’s sample excludes Ivy League universities, liberal arts colleges and many other high-profile schools. In order to address this oversight, I extended their analysis to include an additional 44 schools. Specifically:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the size of DEI bureaucracies varies tremendously across schools. Liberal arts colleges tend to have the largest DEI bureaucracies while lower ranked public universities tend to have the smallest DEI bureaucracies.
But can variation in the size of university DEI bureaucracies explain variation in campus speech environments? In order to answer this question, we need to measure campus speech climates. FIRE’s Campus Rankings Survey allows us to do this:
Assessing the impact of DEI on these measures, however, requires an analysis that can control for other factors that might impact campus speech. These factors can be individual-level or institutional-level. The list of variables I chose to include are listed here:
A multi-level modeling approach allows us to identify the impact of individual and institutional level factors:
The results of this analysis are summarized here (where “+” indicate a statistically significant and positive effect, “-” indicates a statistically significant and negative effect and “blanks” indicate results that were not statistically significant). Remember, the multilevel model also included controls for individual-level influences on speech attitudes.
To illustrate these findings, I present the following graphs (which show the predicted impact of increasing the number of university DEI personnel while holding all other variables constant at their means):
Overall, then, we can conclude that larger DEI bureaucracies are associated with worse campus speech climates. More employees with DEI responsibilities means:
More self-censorship
More discomfort
More support for disruptive action
More skepticism of the administration’s commitment to speech
More intolerance of conservative speakers
There are important caveats, however:
Effects are relatively small
Eliminating DEI would not solve the free speech crisis
Says nothing about the wisdom or effectiveness of DEI on other dimensions
Additionally, there is little reason to believe that “greening” speech codes or endorsing statements like the “Chicago Statement” would improve things. These variables are not consistently related to better campus speech climates.