Ratcheting up his administration’s recent actions against Harvard University, President Donald Trump is now calling on the IRS to revoke the institution’s tax exempt status, in part over his displeasure with their DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) practices, according to the Washington Post.

On Wednesday, in a WaPo op-ed responding to the battle between the president and what many consider the nation’s premier institution of higher education, Musa al-Gharbi pointed to a central and unresolved tension. (Al-Gharbi is a research fellow at Heterodox Academy and an assistant professor of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook,)

The Trump administration, al-Gharbi noted, has “demanded that Harvard review the ideological composition of its faculty and students; for any unit deemed insufficiently diverse, the university would be obliged to admit more students or hire more faculty explicitly on the basis of applicants’ ideological views.” In the same letter, the university has also been ordered by Trump’s team to “abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests.”

“It is literally impossible to comply with this order — to eliminate all ideological litmus tests while imposing more ideological litmus tests,” al-Gharbi wrote. Yet, as al-Gharbi has written elsewhere, “the only way we will ever peaceably answer the perennial and the pressing questions of our day is if we leverage, rather than suppress, the diversity of our humanity.”

So how can we effectively broaden perspectives included in the academy without simply engaging in yet more rounds of ideological gatekeeping? That question was woven throughout HxA’s live virtual panel Wednesday on the subject: “‘DEI’ as we’ve known it is being dismantled. What comes next?”

Our three panelists agreed that DEI as it has been most forcefully practiced of late in North American universities is deeply problematic.

Rachel Altman, Associate Professor of Statistics and co-chair of the HxA Campus Community at Simon Fraser University, called what’s happening in Canada under the banner of EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) “quite troubling” and even “immoral.” She noted that Canadian law allows hiring discrimination on the basis of sex, race, and other categories if it is done in favor of groups historically underrepresented in the faculty ranks. This runs counter to fairness and meritocracy, she said.

According to Altman, EDI is being used “as a mantra” to mean “more than just basic fairness and inclusion.” She quickly came to understand the problem as one of academic freedom, as Altman, who is a leader in the SFU faculty-led Academic Freedom Group, “saw what happened to people who did speak up [about this] and who did express dissenting views, myself included, who would get sort of publicly or semi-publicly shamed.”

Paolo Gaudiano, adjunct professor at NYU, founder of the DEI tech company Aleria, and author of Measuring Inclusion, concurred that “the extreme representation of DEI is wrongheaded. I do not like the lack of tolerance” demonstrated in “draconian” DEI approaches. But, he said, citing al-Gharbi’s work, “I do think that we want to be careful that we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater and try to think about the fact that there are some real problems [in terms of diversity and inclusion in academia] and we do need to find better, more practical, less antagonistic solutions.”

Peter Newton, Associate Professor in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, used similar language in speaking to “a real danger” in having “the baby get[ting] thrown out with the bathwater,” but he argued that problem is coming in part from the failure to be clear what we’re even talking about when we talk about “DEI.”

Newton listed other problems with the lack of clear definition: people talk past each other and that leads to unproductive conversations; we can’t formulate meaningful policy if we can’t define the terms; claims about the benefits of DEI can’t be tested if the concept remains amorphous; and, finally, the lack of definition “can provide cover for nefarious, illegal, or unethical behavioral practices.”

“I think it’s reasonable to wonder whether you’re [using ‘DEI’] as a shield to hide beyond because you can’t defend the idea on its own terms,” Newton said.

With his colleague Matt Burgess, who is now at the University of Wyoming, Newton has argued for replacing requirements for DEI statements in faculty job applications with requiring service statements. Speaking at Wednesday’s panel, Newton noted that requiring DEI statements “can reduce viewpoint diversity on campus by imposing political and ideological litmus tests at the front gate,” and that “can suppress heterodoxy and pluralism.” Service, teaching, and research statements, by contrast, align with faculty job expectations and allow applicants to describe what’s important to them – including in terms of DEI, if they so wish – without requiring a kind of loyalty oath (or what might be read as a protest) to a particular ideology.

All three of our panelists noted the general failure to also measure the efficacy of various “DEI” interventions – or even to specify what outcome is desired. (Is it to make the professoriate look or think more like the background population, as the left has said it should, and now the right says it should? To improve knowledge by bringing in more perspectives? To make up for historical wrongs?)

Looking at available data, Gaudiano has seen that attempts to increase diversity through quota-type approaches ultimately fail because they don’t address underlying academic (or business) cultural problems and consequently lead to poor retention.

“Leading with identity is always a mistake,” Gaudiano said. He argued that if you don’t pay attention to why people drop out – for example, sexual harassment impacting many more women then men in academia – you don’t really attend to inclusion, and you lose the people who feel excluded. (I’ve argued previously that academic culture problems have to be solved if we’re to effectively increase intellectual diversity in the academy.)

Gaudiano maintains that the key is to figure out, from fine-grained surveys (like those described in his book), exactly who is feeling excluded and why, and that if you fix the problems of exclusion – for example, by discovering and fixing problems with transparency and fairness in performance assessment – all those involved will find the culture improves. Retention then also improves.

In Wednesday’s discussion, Altman noted that, in the province where she lives and works – British Columbia – there is a law that can help counteract overreach in EDI: “discrimination in an employment setting on the basis of political belief is outlawed,” she said, “and so with my group at SFU, we’ve been really trying to bring that into the conversation and bring that point to the [university] administration’s attention. And that’s been very helpful.”

Throughout the conversation, the panelists and our audience members batted around the question of when government helps or harms the academic project of knowledge-seeking and education. One listener asked when it is appropriate “for an external stakeholder, such as a state legislature, to attempt to limit discussion of DEI or related topics in the higher ed classroom.”

Altman said this is not a problem in Canada: “Thankfully, we do have academic freedom, so I don’t believe that external stakeholders have any right to get involved in curricular decisions or discussions in the classroom.”

Gaudiano said he thinks the kind of ban described by the listener “really ultimately amounts to very, very targeted censoring, and censoring is never good….We have to be extremely careful about imposing ideologies, and I don’t care whether the ideology is DEI or meritocracy.” (Meritocracy, he explained, “is an ideology as much as DEI until we put numbers on it” by carefully measuring meaningful inputs and outcomes and showing it’s really working.)

Agreeing with the other panelists that government-imposed classroom bans on ideas is a bad approach, Newton observed, “I pay taxes that fund the military and I definitely don’t think you want me making decisions on foreign policy.” He continued, “I think maybe the government has a role in helping to set the foundational principles for universities, academic freedom and freedom of inquiry and non-discrimination and equal opportunity.”

The conversation among these three scholars was far richer than I can capture here, so please do view the entire dialogue for yourself: