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Is diversity simply a box-checking exercise, or does it hold a deeper significance in academia?

Today, we're joined by Azim Shariff, Ph.D, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, to explore the complex landscape of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in higher education. In this conversation, John Tomasi and Azim delve deep into the multifaceted approach to DEI, discussing the pressing need to rethink and clarify the rationale behind diversity in faculty hiring and beyond.

Azim provides a fresh perspective on managing and harnessing diversity's paradox of fostering innovation and coordination challenges. Whether it's the impact of role models on educational outcomes or the intricate balance between meritocracy and social justice motives, this episode promises to unfold the nuanced dynamics of DEI efforts within academic institutions.

Get ready to challenge your understanding of diversity in academia, as we navigate through the meritocratic, social justice, and instrumental values driving DEI initiatives.

Azim Shariff is a Professor and Canada 150 Research Chair at University of British Columbia, where he directs the Centre for Applied Moral Psychology. His research on morality, religion, politics, and technology regularly receives global media coverage, and has appeared in top academic journals such as Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has written about this work for The New York Times and Scientific American, and has spoken at TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival and World Science Festival in New York. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He teaches a free Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on The Science of Religion for the public through edX. Professor Shariff earned his doctorate from UBC in 2010 and returned as a faculty member in 2018.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Azim Shariff, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Azim Shariff: Thanks, John.

John Tomasi: It's really lovely to have you here. I know you came a long way to be part of this podcast today. I think you actually walked down the hallway from your office to the podcast studio. It's been a long journey to get here. Well, we're really happy that you made that journey. Azim is a visiting research scholar here in the Center for Academic Pluralism in New York. And he's down the hall from me in the corner office with sunshine blowing in his windows every day. So much sunshine that I'm not sure you can see your computer screen.

Azim Shariff: Well, I come from Vancouver, so it's nice to be getting some sunshine here. A little bit of that.

John Tomasi: So tell us a little bit about your work and also the path you took to become the professor that you are. How did you come to be a professor?

Azim Shariff: I just didn't stop going to school, really. I like to think that I had a very limited imagination of what one does when one grows up. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a high school teacher because I enjoyed being in school. And I looked around at the people who kept on doing that. And it was the teachers around me. And so then I went to college in order to become a high school teacher. And I looked around at the professors. And I'm like, well, this seems even better. So let's just keep doing this. And I did.

John Tomasi: Interesting. And so when you go to basketball games, you want to become a basketball coach?

Azim Shariff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Does this happen all the time with you? Is it constantly? Are you pretty stable?

Azim Shariff: When I'm having sushi, I'm thinking maybe I made the wrong career choice. This looks cool, too.

John Tomasi: And how did you join Heterodox Academy?

Azim Shariff: I joined a long time ago. John asked me to join. So I'm a social psychologist, study morality like him. And so I've known him for a while. We were chatting shortly after HXA was founded. And he asked me to join.

John Tomasi: And what stage in your career were you then?

Azim Shariff: I would have been an assistant professor.

John Tomasi: Right. And I'm just curious. So what year would that have been, Ruff?

Azim Shariff: 15, 16, were you guys around then?

John Tomasi: That's when we started. That's right. So it was not too long after you started. And I'm just interested.

Azim Shariff: That's when I joined, too. I joined one of the early ones.

John Tomasi: As an assistant professor, was that a worrying decision for you? Was it an act of bravery? Or how did you feel about it?

Azim Shariff: It was, in retrospect, an act of bravery. It didn't seem so at the time. I think that the reputation of Heterodox Academy evolved a little bit over time. When it was first formed, I don't know whether it had the same controversy as it subsequently had within my field. That developed a little later. And I know there were people who chose not to join for that reason. But I didn't think about not joining for that reason.

John Tomasi: Yeah, interesting. I guess you saw people around you joining, so you joined. That's the same way you followed your career path.

Azim Shariff: That's right. That's right. It seems to be a friend.

John Tomasi: So you do work on a whole variety of topics. But some of the work you've been doing lately that we've been talking about here in the Center for Academic Pluralism is work about diversity, and especially diversity in hiring. And you have a working paper, which we discussed in the Center for Academic Pluralism's weekly seminar a while ago, and we'll be discussing another version of it soon, about diversity for what? Ten rationales for diversity in faculty hiring. Can we talk about that paper a little bit?

Azim Shariff: Of course.

John Tomasi: The paper begins with a metaphor about the men feeling up the elephant. Would you tell us about that?

Azim Shariff: Right, so I think everybody knows about this parable, which is you have a number of blind men, and they're each feeling a different part of the elephant, the tail and the ear and the side. And they're asked, what are you feeling? And they say it's a different animal, which I think is the opposite of what happens with diversity in the context of faculty hiring. People think that they're talking about the same thing, but they're actually talking about different animals. And that's been my experience on many, many search committees that I've sat on, where everybody seems to be on the same page to begin with. Everybody seems to be recognizing that diversity is a priority until it starts coming to the concrete questions. And then we realized maybe we weren't on the same page, so we asked questions like, in social psychology, would it be better to hire a white faculty member who studied social justice issues and race, or would it be better to hire an underrepresented minority who studied something unrelated to that topic? Or is an Asian person diverse? Is a woman diverse? And then somebody who's read a lot of Haidt and wants to hire a conservative. And we all realized, okay, we thought we were all on the same page about diversity, but it seems like we mean different things.

John Tomasi: When you say that people are on the same page, do you mean that they're all accepting a certain identitarian approach to hiring in the first place? Are there some people who are not on that page who don't think about diversity at all, but to say, all I care about is finding the best person? Or does that lead to diversity too?

Azim Shariff: Yes, no, there are those people. But I think that everybody recognizes that diversity is now part of the game. I don't think that there's a search that happens where diversity is not talked about, at least not in my field, at least not in the universities that I'm part of. Maybe that's changing in some universities. People value it to different degrees, but they also mean different things when they're talking about what they value.

John Tomasi: But let me push on that a little bit more. So I'm thinking about some people I know, many people I know. But one of a popular figure for this view is Dorian Abbot, sort of a Shills report from the University of Chicago ideal of meritocracy that commonly believed that we should hire the best person for the position. A person who takes that view into a hiring committee, which many people do, and some people like Dorian think everyone should do, are they immune to diversity issues? Or is diversity not going to crop up for them too?

Azim Shariff: Well, I think actually implicitly, if we start taking the question of what diversity means seriously, realize that everybody actually endorsed some form of diversity because we're talking about hiring people who study different things.

John Tomasi: Wait, that's what I'm wondering. Okay.

Azim Shariff: Yeah. So if you were a pure meritocrat and you were just trying to hire the best people on our traditional metrics of whatever, and you were trying to make a university out of that, and you hired the hundred people in America with the hundred academics, say, with the highest IQ, you'd probably hire a lot of physicists and engineers and mathematicians. And then, and you'd have a really good university to build a quantum computer, but not much else. And I don't think that that's the goal. I don't think that that gets us to the full production of human knowledge that we try to seek as universities. If you were to hire the best, the most highly cited researchers, you'd probably get a lot of microbiologists. They get cited a lot. So you'd have a really good micro, you'd, you'd understand protein folding very, very well, but, but we want diversity because we want to know more than that.

John Tomasi: Right, right. Okay. So, we're going to get into your paper and the, and the taxonomy that you provide, which is really rich and fascinating, but still, I wanted to pause. That's why I'm sure we're entering the question together and seeing the question the way it is, not too much like two men feeling an elephant and not seeing things. So, when we approach this question about faculty hiring for diversity, there is commonly in the room, in rooms I've been in, and I'm sure you've been in too, there is, as you say, a background idea that diversity is going to be important. It can be important for a variety of reasons. You might want to get different viewpoints in this, let's say you're searching within some subfield or some department, say political science within political theory, for example. So the endocrinologists or the microbiologists are not going to be, but you're still looking here. There are meritocrats, many of them. I've been one on hiring committees, just trying to hire the best person. But part of what I think about is, well, who will add to our department and make our political theory group more interesting, more lively, more self-reflective, broader in our thinking, deeper in our thinking, who can provide? It's not just you on your own. I'm not hiring a department of one. I'm hiring someone to add to an existing group. And that's where I suppose the diversity considerations, one-way diversity considerations can start coming in.

Azim Shariff: Yeah, so one of the things I talk about in the paper that I think you didn't like the first time we read it is this idea of the collective brain.

John Tomasi: I cannot play collective brains. I was just thinking the way they use their term collective in all of a sudden.

Azim Shariff: But this is an idea that comes out of cultural evolution. So Joe Henrich and Michael Muthukrishna have written some really good papers on this, as well as a number of other people.

John Tomasi: Well, I think Matt Ridley wrote a book on how knowledge develops, where they talk about how innovation develops. This is the book called The Rational Optimist.

Azim Shariff: No, subsequent to that.

John Tomasi: Oh, there's no one.

Azim Shariff: How Innovation Works or something. And the general idea there is that we don't have these quantum leaps driven by singular geniuses. Knowledge grows by the recombination of ideas and incremental tweaking by a whole bunch of people. And so that's the collective brain. The human societies are these collective brains that once you put them together, more knowledge develops. And if you just had singular people working on their own, you're not going to get as much out of that.

John Tomasi: Right, right. Still thinking again about walking into the room and having the diversity and hiring stuff in our minds. We're going to sort out in a moment in your paper, I promise. But before we do that still, I would think that another, my experience suggests that another thing that's in our minds, all of us, when we walk into the room, do a faculty hiring, is this shared historical awareness that there has been systematic discrimination against some groups that kept those groups out of the room. Another kind of diversity that's been lacking. It could be on a gender dimension. It could be on a racial dimension. It could be on other dimensions as well. Sometimes religious dimensions. So is that when people, is there a commonality about diversity in those forms too that you're addressing in their papers? Or is there a background or question about diversity that is framing these subcategories we're about to start talking about?

Azim Shariff: Yeah, so I think that's interesting because I think that there's, in the literature on the justifications for diversity, they tend to split them into two main categories. One are the instrumental motives for diversity, just optimizing, trying to do something better. And then, say, having better team performance or developing better education. Contrasted with what diversity was originally talked about, which was in the context of justice motives. Coming out of the civil rights movements, we have groups that have been disadvantaged, and we want to rectify that.

John Tomasi: For the sake of justice.

Azim Shariff: For the sake of justice. But I think both of those actually do have this sort of idea behind them in the context of universities, which is that we are—the reason that we pursue truth, the reason we're trying to optimize anything in a university, the reason we're trying to create new knowledge better, is because universities are devoted, ultimately, to human flourishing. And that's also why we pursue the justice motives. So, even though we have this bifurcation between instrumental and justice motives, above that, both of those serve this higher master, which is this attempt to build a better society, or a more flourishing human society. That's why we want new knowledge.

John Tomasi: So, in one formulation, Jon Haidt made the formulation famous, that there's two different telos, tele, for universities, two rival tele. It could be for the pursuit of social justice or the pursuit of truth. Everyone has to choose. You're saying that, even for those of us who accept the truth justification of the telos, the truth answer to the question, what's the telos of the university? But there's something lying behind truth. There's a reason why universities pursue truth.

Azim Shariff: That's right. That's right.

John Tomasi: And say again what that is.

Azim Shariff: Well, I mean, saying something like human flourishing is a pretty abstract thing because people are going to define it differently, but I think that that's why we've recognized that it's worth devoting all these resources to trying to pursue the truth, is that the truth accomplishes something. It makes us, it makes our lives better, and it has historically, not in a linear fashion. Sometimes it deviates us often to unfortunate places, but by and large, the growing of knowledge has grown human flourishing. And where I think John's distinction has value is that there may be more expeditious paths to get to human flourishing, so maybe truth is a particular powerful one, and that we can keep pursuing both of those goals alongside until they conflict. And then when they conflict, then you start trying to figure out, well, which way actually gets us to that Ur goal better and faster. And maybe if some of the social justice motives get in the way of the truth in too deleterious a way, then that's going to be ultimately more costly to human flourishing than beneficial.

John Tomasi: In your paper, you talk about different kinds of diversity that we might want to pursue, and you suggest that the question of what kinds of diversity to pursue is downstream from a question about different rationales for diversity. Is that the structure?

Azim Shariff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Can you just say more about that?

Azim Shariff: Yeah, sure. So part of the, I think part of Heterodox Academy is trying to increase what's called perspectival diversity, viewpoint diversity. That's one of our three core values, open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, structured disagreement. Viewpoint diversity is right in the middle. So I remember there was this, there was a job posting several years ago at the University of Victoria, Canada, and they wanted for their psychology, I think it was for the psychology department, they wanted to hire a indigenous scholar or a scholar of studying indigenous things. And this was after Heterodox was founded. A grad student tweeted under that ad, if you really wanted diversity, you would hire a conservative. A common refrain. Yeah. Of course, it being Twitter, this grad student was just then piled upon, and that made me realize, well, we really need to get clear on what kind of diversity we're pursuing. Clearly, people have different ideas, but the reason they have different ideas is because they have these different motivations, and that's kind of where this paper started. So I had four rationales then, which I suggested in a Twitter thread under that, and had people vote on them. And those four rationales, as I've been thinking about it over the years, have blossomed into these 10.

John Tomasi: Nice. Let's start talking about the categories. So you have five broad categories, and then there are subcategories within them.

Azim Shariff: Yeah. Does it make sense to talk about the broad categories first? How do you want to approach this?

John Tomasi: So we're now approaching the question, this important question, how should we think about diversity in hiring, in faculty hiring? What's the, maybe we might say, what's the appropriate role for thinking about using diversity in faculty hiring? And you're not going to be answering that question with a recommendation. What you're providing us, what you're providing us with, is something that we don't currently have, which is a very careful taxonomy of all the answers on the multiple choice test. It's kind of a complex multiple choice test. There'll be 10 boxes. You can choose one of these 10. But you're providing a taxonomy to clarify our thinking, our understanding of what the options might be when we answer that question.

Azim Shariff: That's right. And different departments and different search committees and faculties are going to have different preferences among those. They will be motivated by different rationales. I just want them to think clearly about them. And so the ones I've identified, these are all the ones that I've seen justifiably talked about.

John Tomasi: Okay, but I'm still a little bit uncertain about one thing that we touched on a minute ago. I just want to go back to it once more time to see if we can get it clearer. This is not a discussion now for people who are committed to the idea that meritocracy is not the way to hire, and it's just the people who accept diversity and try to clarify their thinking. This is a paper, I think, and a taxonomy that should be of interest to anyone who cares about excellence in research, or actually who's involved in faculty hiring. This is not a way to clarify the thinking of the social justice people.

Azim Shariff: That's right. I think even the people who are single-mindedly driven by meritocracy, I think, can benefit from some of these rationales, that they should be thinking about diversity in some contexts.

John Tomasi: Is it because the rationales are going to pick up thoughts like the one that that grad student you mentioned had? What's diversity? Well, maybe it should be this. Yeah.

Azim Shariff: Yeah. And so actually, if we want to talk about the broad categories, the five families, the first one, for lack of a better term, is the family of meritocracy. Because I think that diversity and meritocracy are not unrelated in this sense. And so the first two rationales, if you're ready to jump into them. Let's do it. So the very first one is avoiding hiring biases. And avoiding hiring biases seems like...

John Tomasi: So we're in the category now of meritocratic rationales for faculty hiring, for diversity hiring, in fact, faculty searches. And within that, we're saying that one of them is avoiding hiring bias.

Azim Shariff: Yeah, so you could also call the meritocracy family the talented workforce argument, that if you're blinded by prejudices, or you're discriminating against certain groups for reasons that are unrelated to their job performance, you are leaving quality on the table. Even if you're just tied to the traditional metrics of academic excellence at the preservation and production and transmission of knowledge. Even if that's what you're motivated by, and that's all you're motivated by, you still want to avoid hiring biases. And you still want to do the second thing, which is account for disadvantage. Because...

John Tomasi: So avoiding hiring biases, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. That's... If there are groups that you're prejudiced about, well, find out where those prejudices are and overcome them.

Azim Shariff: Right.

John Tomasi: So that the best applicant doesn't get overlooked because they happen to have some sort of group affiliation that you're prejudiced against. And that could be a racial category. That could be a gender category. That could be something that HXA has talked about a lot, which is a political bias.

Azim Shariff: Those political biases are very strong. I think that for academics, they're going to feel much less comfortable hiring somebody from a different political background than somebody from a different racial background, I think.

John Tomasi: So on this way of thinking about it now, we're thinking about a person taking a strictly meritocratic rationale for hiring. We should be thinking about diversity questions insofar as they might make us fail to pick the best candidate. We may not see one, for example, for a variety of reasons.

Azim Shariff: Yeah. Yeah.

John Tomasi: Well, and you mentioned disadvantage is another one.

Azim Shariff: Disadvantage is another one, right?

John Tomasi: Within meritocracy.

Azim Shariff: Yeah. Whereas the hiring biases are targeted at the biases that the committee has. So the obstacles that the best applicant would face to have their application recognized as the best application, disadvantage is the obstacles that somebody faced that have now led to their application under predicting their promise. So what we try to do as academics is what we're trying to predict what we really care about is what somebody's future performance is going to be once we hire them. And we use as an imperfect predictor of that what their past performance is. But if for some reason, some systematic reason, their past performance is underpredictive, maybe they faced more obstacles than somebody else, then you're actually missing the person who has the most promise because you're weighing the applications similarly without factoring in the different challenges that they faced.

John Tomasi: And just to be clear, these factors that can be disadvantages needn't have anything to do with social justice issues, I think. So, for example, I remember years ago when I was at Princeton as a postdoc, there was a search going on in political theory. And there were three finalists who were all being discussed, and we were debating and talking about these people. And one of the three, only one of the three, had been teaching for years at a small liberal arts college. The others were both from a big research, a prominent research department. And I remember the search committee chair, I remember her saying, you know, there's something about this third candidate who's produced this great work at a small liberal arts college with a heavy teaching load without the resources all around him. That made me think that if we hire him, we're going to see that disadvantage, which is obviously a lovely world. He was teaching at a great liberal arts school. But still in that context, that's the kind of disadvantage you're talking about?

Azim Shariff: That's right. That's right. They've been boxing with weights in their gloves. And if you take those weights out, you know, they're going to punch real hard. And I had a similar thing. There was a candidate. Let's see how obliquely I can talk about this. There was a candidate, similarly, who had just an extraordinary record, but was positioned at a regional Canadian university, not one of the big ones. And the fact that this candidate had accomplished so much, even if this person had done something that was equivalent to what the other applicants had done. So say they had the same number and quality of papers published to have done that from a position with high teaching loads, limited grant money, fewer opportunities. If you put them, the assumption is that if you now put them somewhere where they have the same opportunities as maybe some of the other candidates had, they would accomplish even more. And the comparison I use in the paper is that there's the saying about search committees that they can add, but they can't divide, right? They can add the number of papers, but they can't divide it by the number of years it took to produce those papers. So they'll treat somebody who's a fifth-year graduate student the same as they'll treat somebody who's done two postdocs. But it's dividing by the opportunities that they had. This person just had more years to produce the same amount of work. Similar thing for somebody who's at a regional university or somebody who's faced challenges because of the categories that we associate with social justice.

John Tomasi: So when some people are on these hiring committees looking at candidates who are concerned to hire the best person, that is, the person who's going to be the most productive in the future, they have some reasons to think about overcoming their own hiring biases. Because they want a clearer view than they're worried they might otherwise have about what that future might look like. They also have reasons to think about issues like disadvantages, relative disadvantages, time sliced in the way you're describing. For that same set of rationales, in pursuit of that same deeper idea, because their concern is, find the person who's going to produce the very best scholarship three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now.

Azim Shariff: That's right.

John Tomasi: And so let's move on to another category, maybe an opposite category, I'm not really sure, but a very different category, social justice. Yeah. So tell us about that one, that rationale.

Azim Shariff: Right. So whereas the previous one, you want to pay attention to factors that are discussed in the social justice conversation. The factors about disadvantage, factors of biasing and stereotypes and prejudices, those are in the pursuit of simply the traditional motivations for excellent scholarship. The social justice one is, it adds a broader goal, and it's less targeted on individuals and more targeted on societal disadvantage. So here, you have groups that have been disadvantaged in the past by state-sanctioned injustices. And these results...

John Tomasi: Such as state-sanctioned slavery.

Azim Shariff: Exactly. Exactly.

John Tomasi: Or state-sanctioned Jim Crow or whatever, segregated schools.

Azim Shariff: That's right. Yeah.

John Tomasi: And we could go on.

Azim Shariff: Oh, we can go on for a long time. And those were unjust in the past, and they've led to disparities in wealth and power in the present. And the social justice movement is trying to rectify those through multiple different ways. And one of the ways that you can do so is through the lever of faculty hiring. It might not be the most efficient or broadly expeditious way of doing so, but it is one way you could do it. And so the idea there, and this is broken down into two different rationales, social restitution and social reorganization.

John Tomasi: Let's talk about restitution.

Azim Shariff: Restitution. So there, the idea is to compensate for the injustices that were visited on certain groups. You give favorable treatment now to people who are members of those groups. It's the same argument that is given for reparations. It's just, what is the form of the reparation? And it's you give some hiring preferences as a consequence. And that elevates certain members who are from these groups that have faced injustices.

John Tomasi: And we're now, just to remind people, we are working with a zero-sum worldview, right? So if the situation is, I'll hire this person and not that person.

Azim Shariff: That's right.

John Tomasi: So we're using restitution to make that move at that price.

Azim Shariff: But that's the price they say they're willing to pay. And the same is, the same argument would be made for cash reparations. You're redistributing wealth in the society to certain groups as a way of compensating people.

John Tomasi: You're giving it to some, but you're taking it from others.

Azim Shariff: That's right. That's the idea.

John Tomasi: Which both of our countries have done in the past.

Azim Shariff: Right.

John Tomasi: So go on more about that. So restitution is one of the big categories within social justice. What's the other?

Azim Shariff: The other is social reorganization. I'm calling it social reorganization. Maybe somebody has a better term for that. But where social restitution is this backwards-looking thing, you're trying to compensate for some injustice in the past, social reorganization is you're trying to rebalance power structures for the future. And so it's different in motivation. It's different in aim. They're both social justice-related. They're different in aim, and they have some practical differences, too. So for a social reorganization, you are trying to rebalance groups that are, right now, because of past injustices, are disparate in wealth and power and privilege. And to do that, one way of doing that is you elevate certain members of those groups to positions of power, of which maybe academics aren't the most powerful. Profession, maybe on certain dimensions, are not super powerful at all. But I do think that academics have cultural power. And so that does elevate, to some degree, the power of the whole group. Now, one way in which it's different from social restitution is that there's actually other ways using the lever of faculty hiring that you can also rebalance the power structures in certain fields, which is that you can rely not on the identity of the person that you're hiring, but on the research that the person does. And so that comes back to one of the questions that I mentioned earlier, which is when you get into these search committees and you have this option between hiring somebody who's not from an underrepresented or disadvantaged group, but studies topics which are relevant about that, does that count? And for social restitution, it probably wouldn't count, but for social reorganization, it would, because that does help with progress towards that mission of rebalancing power structures. It just does so through the research that the person does, rather than through the identity of the person who's holding the faculty position.

John Tomasi: Let me understand what's going on here. So we're talking about faculty hiring. There's a committee now meeting in a room, having a conversation about three candidates or five. They're trying to find a short list of candidates of three or five, let's say. And there could be two people in that room who are both committed to social justice as an important part of their, they think, responsibilities as they're hiring. One of them is now thinking, oh, restitution is what I'm trying to do. And that's what my colleague over there is also trying to do, because she cares about social justice. Me. But she's thinking to herself, actually, I'm thinking about social reorganization, not restitution. And they're not aware of that. They're each working within the social justice paradigm, they think.

Azim Shariff: Well, they are.

John Tomasi: And yet, they're aligning, are they choosing different candidates? Are they disagreeing? How is this playing out now in the room?

Azim Shariff: That's right. They might be, right? And I think this has probably happened in my field in psychology, as well as other social sciences, and probably even the humanities, quite a bit. They do have two different candidates who differ on identity versus research, which one contributes more to the social justice motives. And if you're, if implicitly, you're really motivated by the social restitution argument, then the research is going to matter less to you. You're going to want to go to the person who comes from the disadvantaged group. If, on the other hand, you're still motivated by social justice, but you're motivated by the reorganization principle, then you might be torn. How much is the, is what they do for their research actually going to contribute more? Well, if it is, then that's actually a better way to get to the social justice goal.

John Tomasi: Interesting. I'm just trying to think about my own experience on search committees. And at Brown, when I served on committees or chaired search committees, there was this background idea that was at least the public ideal, which is that we're trying to hire the best person in every case. So if someone had said out loud, I want to hire for restitution, they would have been stopped immediately and said, we don't hire that way. Isn't that a common understanding when there's something about what people say and what they mean? I've noticed on committees that I've been involved with that sometimes I suspected that people on the search committee with me were actually motivated not by choosing the best person, but motivated by something else like restitution. And therefore, they'd be dressing up a weak CV on these other terms and trying to make the case, not straight up for restitution, but for some other way. So there's like this double speak that goes on within committees a lot. Now, part of that, I think, is maybe the legacy of some legal decisions that were made in the U.S. So the famous 1978 Supreme Court decision, Bakke versus the Regents of California, that constrained but allowed for affirmative action in student hiring.

Azim Shariff: That's right. And the case was Alan Bakke sued California because he was denied admission to a medical school. That's right. Those test scores were higher than some people who were admitted. And the question was, can the university use race on the market? And the person who wrote the majority opinion, Justice Powell, went through all the rationales for why affirmative action should be allowed and dismissed most of them. Dismissed the ones that were justice-related, but permitted the one that was instrumentally related. So he said, well, it's not appropriate that we use this as a means to ease the past history of discrimination. That is, it's not appropriate that we use this for social restitution.

John Tomasi: Right.

Azim Shariff: But it is appropriate that we use it for improving the education of all students, which is an instrumental goal.

John Tomasi: I'm going to read a sentence from your paper where you quote Justice Powell. It's quite a striking, I underlined it in red, star next week, so I was struck by the line. So I have some grave doubts about the Bakke decision, but leave that aside. I'll read your sentence, the broader set of, quote, quoting you now, the broader set of backgrounds, experiences, and outlooks, in Justice Powell's words, create an, quote, atmosphere of speculation, experiment, and creation so essential to the quality of higher education, close quote Powell, close quote. That's just a lovely line, right? That's the idea that this atmosphere of speculation, experiment, and creation is so essential to the higher education.

Azim Shariff: Yeah, and I think it is, but it's an instrumental motive. And so, given that that was a Supreme Court decision, now it became legally questionable to justify affirmative action on the basis of the justice motivations. But it was legally permissible to do so on the basis of these instrumental ones. And so, you end up with situations like the one that you're describing, which is that people actually have the social justice motivations, but they phrase it in a way that's not going to get them legally in trouble, which is through an instrumental justification.

John Tomasi: So, part of what this paper is doing, and you talk about this in several places, I believe, somewhat obliquely, but it's certainly in the paper. You're trying to bring transparency to conversation so that people don't find themselves on these hiring committees engaged in doublespeak and deception, but they're actually now given the opportunity, let's put it positively, given the opportunity to put their cards on the table. Or maybe to become more honest to themselves about what their motivations are when they find themselves in this position of power on a committee, making a decision about the future of the university. They're making a hire, as you know, which is going to be paid for through a whole number of years. It's a huge commitment on the part of the university. They are fiduciaries' responsibilities to the university to follow their criteria to choose the best people. And yet, they're individuals with their views, their histories. I mean, I was involved in a search in a department recently where there had never been a black person hired in a tenure position. And that was on people's minds in the room. I think it always was when they were hiring in that room. But can they say that? How does it affect the way they think? How should it affect the way they think? They have an obligation to the university to state what they're really thinking, put it on the table so we can talk about it. Your paper is trying to give us the tools to clarify, at least the opportunity, clarify what the thinking is really about, what rationales are actually being employed.

Azim Shariff: That's right. That's right.

John Tomasi: And it's on both those dimensions, right? To clarify to oneself as well as to clarify to everybody else.

Azim Shariff: That's right.

John Tomasi: And so what about another rationale? You talk about a broad category of rationales, concerns role models. Tell us about that.

Azim Shariff: So that, I think, is a very powerful and persuasive argument that's been made in search committees that I've been in. You have a diversifying, a very rapidly diversifying student body. And it diversifies much more rapidly than the faculty does.

John Tomasi: One statistic you gave, I can't quote it off the top of my head, but I was really struck by it. It was about the University of California system. And the ratio of white professors compared to the ratio of white undergraduates was remarkably disparate.

Azim Shariff: Yeah. I mean, I'll give you another example. So when I was hired at UC Irvine, our student body, our entering student body that year was, it was, I think it was almost 70% Hispanic and Asian. It may have been more than that. And the department that I was hired into was 90-something percent white. There were two Asian people, me and somebody else. And that's a big disparity. And that means that if you're a Hispanic or an Asian or a black or an indigenous psychology student, you're probably never going to see a professor who looks like you in terms of the racial background. And is that going to affect you? Is it going to affect how easily you can see yourself pursuing that path? Is it going to even affect how your grades are, your likelihood of staying on in the university? Well, there's actually a lot of research on this. And what it tends to show is for the race effects, there really are these role model effects. So it's actually especially the case.

John Tomasi: So for race in particular.

Azim Shariff: For race in particular, and most strongly for African-Americans. When they have a black professor, they show higher grades as a consequence.

John Tomasi: So we're now talking about the effect of having role models on educational outcomes.

Azim Shariff: That's right.

John Tomasi: That's the specific category. So the category within role models, one of the categories is improving educational outcomes. And people say, I wanted to hire for racial diversity, let's say, because I believe that hiring a role model will improve educational outcomes for people in that group.

Azim Shariff: Yeah, which is part of our job, of course, right? So...

John Tomasi: What's our job? I'm sorry.

Azim Shariff: Improving outcomes of students.

John Tomasi: Improving educational outcomes of students.

Azim Shariff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Right.

Azim Shariff: And so one way you can do it is by being a role model that just happens to look like the student.

John Tomasi: So one way you might think you can do it is that. But the data, that's an empirical question.

Azim Shariff: That's right.

John Tomasi: I swear that's true or not.

Azim Shariff: That's right.

John Tomasi: What does the data show that you've read?

Azim Shariff: So for the race effect, I think that there's a detectable effect, for sure. That having somebody of your own race, especially for African-Americans, as I mentioned, has an effect on grades. They've also done, in fact, much more research on gender. And there, the results are more mixed.

John Tomasi: And I'm sorry, this is purely role models, purely... We're talking about the relationship of role models to educational outcomes, strictly at the collegiate level. This is not about prior role models.

Azim Shariff: So actually, the effects are stronger earlier on in education. So to have a teacher, to have an elementary school teacher actually has a both, definitely for race, I think also for gender, it has an effect. At college, it seems to be a smaller effect for race and a smaller effect for gender, too. The gender effect, the studies are inconsistent on whether there actually is an effect there. But the educational component is one of the rationales. And there's a second rationale, which is for non-educational outcomes, these could be exploding stereotypes. So a good friend of mine is a female philosophy professor at Barnard. And she made the point to me, well, men need to see female philosophy professors, too. And why? Well, because it can explode these stereotypes about who's a good philosopher, who's a good thinker, who has competence and power and all these things. So having people, especially from disadvantaged groups, are in these positions as role models can be beneficial for stereotypes that both in-group and out-group students hold.

John Tomasi: Now, as a… So that's not improving educational outcomes.

Azim Shariff: No, that's the improving non-educational outcomes. Again, there might be a better term for that.

John Tomasi: So the other subcategory. The other rationales.

Azim Shariff: The other subcategory.

John Tomasi: That's right. The other subcategory. Within role modeling, you can role model for learning outcomes and then for non-learning outcomes.

Azim Shariff: Right. Among the non-learning outcomes is one thing is exploding stereotypes. But there's another one. And I'll tell you another one. So I'm a South Asian psychology professor. And I have a lot of students who come to me who are from traditional South Asian families where you don't talk about mental health. And so I teach intro psych. I teach a couple lectures on psychological disorders, mental illness. Those students come talk to me because they can't talk to the parents about this stuff. And they say, well, you know, I feel all these kinds of ways. I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do about this. My family doesn't support psychotherapy or psychomedication. Those people feel more comfortable talking to somebody who looks like them, who they maybe assume has the same background as them, than they would to just anybody else.

John Tomasi: Yeah, that's fascinating. And that's your personal experience.

Azim Shariff: That's my personal experience.

John Tomasi: And is there other studies done of this? Do we have a sense where this is?

Azim Shariff: I don't know.

John Tomasi: Is how robust is that? Do we know?

Azim Shariff: I don't know. I don't know.

John Tomasi: That's fascinating. And now coming to one of my favorite categories, heterodoxy. So let's talk about that rationale for diversity.

Azim Shariff: Lowercase heterodoxy.

John Tomasi: Lowercase heterodoxy.

Azim Shariff: Yeah, right. So there, obviously, this is one that we discuss a lot here at Heterodox Academy, but I think even within heterodoxy, you can break it down into different rationales. And so the first rationale I have there is just raising different questions. People from different backgrounds raise different questions. And you have a long history of this in scholarship. So there's tons of examples of this. When female medical researchers started being better represented in medical research, they pushed to have more female participants in the research studies, which lo and behold gave us all this knowledge about the way that women's bodies work differently from men's bodies, which ultimately helped save lives. Du Bois talks about how Musa is the one who turned me on to this.

John Tomasi: Musa al-Gharbi.

Azim Shariff: Yeah, he was a sociologist, turned me on to this example that prior to Du Bois and other black sociologists, when the entirely white field of sociology would talk about racial disparities, they would talk about it all in the deficiencies of the people from the non-white races. There's a tendency to have the explanatory lens on whoever seems to be the deviant group. And so if you're the majority group, you're going to see the minority group as deviant and put the explanatory burden on them. But when Du Bois and others came in, they flipped the script. They were like, well, okay, these disparities can be explained by the behavior of the majority group, by the white people. There could be discrimination that's explaining this. And interestingly, in a very different context, you see a similar thing happening in social psychology for liberals and conservatives. Not that there's a disadvantage-advantage thing like there was back with the racial issue, but you similarly have, because the liberals are the majority, when you're looking at liberal and conservative thinking, the explanatory burden is placed on, well, why is it that conservatives think this way? Rather than looking at, well, why do liberals think this way, which quite outside of any political animosity, it's important to know why people think that way. You're the fish in water. You don't realize it if you're not outside of the water. This is the case in cultural psychology, where the researchers were Western researchers, and they didn't realize that Westerners think in a particular way until they had people who were non-Westerners telling us that we thought in a different way. They just assumed this is the default. This is the way everybody thinks. And so I don't even need to think about how peculiar, how weird it might be.

John Tomasi: So diversity could increase the creativity of research? Is that the same category?

Azim Shariff: The broad set of interests that people are in and the questions that they raise. The creativity, yeah. So these categories bleed into a little bit, but I've separated team performance and creativity as a separate thing, because that I would talk about in the context of research teams and the diversity among research teams. This is, at the field level, what kind of questions are people from different backgrounds bringing in? At the team level, then, let's talk about that. So there's research showing, again, it's a complicated literature. It's not all uniform in showing these effects, but there's research showing that diversity within organizations leads to increased performance sometimes. So it's been investigated a lot in organizational psychology. Do you say investment groups that have a diversity among their employees? Do they have better returns? Where it seems to really appear is in science research teams. So when you have diversity among scientific research teams, if you have people from different countries, people from different ethnicities especially, those teams seem to produce research which is more impactful as measured by objective criteria like citations.

John Tomasi: And those kinds of, that claim in particular, it's holding constant, for example, straight IQ across the groups. Because, again, you're choosing some and you're losing some others you could have had in the room. So that study would be saying, if we choose for diversity, we'll get the benefits of different kinds of thinking. Holding steady for IQ. If we just went for the, whatever, I'm not sure what word to use here, but the best candidate on an IQ chart, for example, would that group have outperformed the more diverse one?

Azim Shariff: I don't know that they looked at that in the studies. But I guess, so one reason could be that if you're in the UK and you're only looking at British scholars and you're trying to find all the best, the highest IQ British scholars. And you do find them all and then you put them into teams. Well, there's 99% of the rest of the population that you've ignored and there might be some high IQ people out there. And they also might have different perspectives. They might think about things. They might have access to different research populations. They might have different methodologies. They may have grown up with different assumptions. All these things are going to create this non-overlapping set of strengths and weaknesses in your research team that's going to hopefully produce better work.

John Tomasi: And what about groupthink? What about exploding this common being in the bubble?

Azim Shariff: Yeah, so that's actually the third rationale there. And there, we know from a lot of research that people are selective in the scrutiny that they apply to favored and disfavored conclusions in research. And so they'll be a little lighter on their scrutiny to something that produces something that they agree with or that the group around them has pressured them to be in agreement with. Then they will be with scrutiny for things which fall outside of what their group really values, etc. Haidt has talked a lot about this, that we're not good at noticing these biases in ourselves. There's a bunch of research on what's called the biased blind spot that people can recognize the biases that other people hold, but they don't feel like they fall for those biases themselves. There's even something, the biased blind spot, blind spot, which is that people think that they are less likely to fall for the biased blind spot than other people are. So we don't recognize. Aren't humans marvelous? I know, we have an endless capacity for self-perception. And that comes at the cost of our research. We need people with different perspectives to check our work. And so having at a field level, people who believe different things, have different sets of values, allows the work to undergo scrutiny from more different sides. Or at least more conclusions to be put through the ringer so that we don't go down rabbit holes to conduct research or make interpretations which end up being well-accepted and comforting but wrong.

John Tomasi: Are there costs to diversity on the heterodox dimension? So for example, if you have these groups that are more diverse in the ways you're describing, people who, thinkers and researchers who don't share premises, but in fact have not just different premises, but perhaps dueling and conflicting premises. How does that affect the nature of the research?

Azim Shariff: Well, it makes it harder. It makes it harder. And it makes it less pleasant. And so this is something that's talked about in the diversity literature quite a bit. Michael Muthukrishna and his authors have a paper called The Paradox of Diversity. I think it's The Paradox of Diversity in the Collective Brain. And they make the point that, yeah, diversity adds innovation, but it also adds coordination challenges. And a good example of this is anybody who's done interdisciplinary research can be really, really promising. It can be very impactful when you get it to work. But to get it to work, it's often a struggle because you're wrestling to get on the same page for people who are used to different methodologies, and different assumptions, and a whole bunch of stuff. When you factor in then people with, say, different political beliefs, now all of a sudden you have different values, too. And you add suspicion. And you have people who, instead of telling you that you're right all the time, are people telling you that you're wrong all the time. And that's less fun as a researcher. But it makes our scholarship better if you can push through that. So if you can manage to surmount those coordination challenges and not just give up, then the resultant research seems to be very impactful. It seems to be a better scholarship.

John Tomasi: And there's a lot of research, I'm sure you know, in the same question about pluralism, the advantages and disadvantages of pluralism in different domains of life. There's a lot of research done on the domain of political life. So Diana Mutz, a distinguished professor at UPenn, also a fellow here at the Center for Academic Pluralism, has done fascinating work about showing democracy, democratic societies, they want to have more participation, they want wider participation, but also they want better quality of deliberation. And Diana shows in a bunch of different studies that, in fact, the quality of deliberation and the ambition for greater pluralism are often in tension with each other, at least for some periods. Let's go on to the last rationale that you described, and one that I've been very aware of on my experience in hiring committees, signaling. What is signaling?

Azim Shariff: Yeah, so this seems like a big motivator. A lot of administrators and a lot of departments, when they talk about diversity, it seems like what they care most about is that the department looks diverse in a photograph.

John Tomasi: Or they'd be embarrassed that it not.

Azim Shariff: Right. That it's embarrassingly homogenous, and they don't want it to look that way.

John Tomasi: I know in my department, the political science at Brown, they have a series of photographs for the department through the years. And everyone kind of looks at some of the older photographs, some of which are not that old, by the way, 30 years back, and they're all white males. They look old.

Azim Shariff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: But there's that happening, right? Then this remarkable change happened.

Azim Shariff: Yeah, yeah, right. So we, similar in my department, same thing. And I think people can take a cynical view to that, and certainly there's a cynical component about that. But on the other hand, I think that signaling as an institution is something very important for universities because we do communicate with the outside world. We depend on the outside world. We have many stakeholders out there. And say students, potential students, are going to feel more welcomed by an institution if they see that it's not embarrassingly homogenous. And so they're going to be more likely to apply. Then you have a larger group of students who are applying, which means you can apply. Is that a defect on the part of students to think about the world that way? I don't think so. I don't think so. They're working on limited information to figure out what their experience is going to be like, and that might be a relevant factor. In fact, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that it's a relevant factor. But also, they're not the only people. We have, we as university institutions add things to society, but we need society to trust us, to trust the research that comes out of us, trust our expertise. And if they think that we don't represent them, then you're also going to have a problem, right? So it's demonstrating to our communities that we are representative of them, that we're not biased because of an embarrassing homogeneity. And then even politicians and donors and the other people upon who universities depend, they're also going to be turned off by us if we look biased and homogenous. And not representing them.

John Tomasi: Thank you. So you've distinguished five broad categories of diversity in hiring, rationales for diversity in hiring, merit, social justice, role modeling, heterodoxy, and signaling. I wonder if we can close by having you say a few things about what you hope the study of yours, which is still a work in progress. What hopes do you have for your study? What would you, what would you like it to contribute? What would you like its contribution to be?

Azim Shariff: I would love it if before every search committee, even at just at my university, when people started talking about diversity, they established which of these rationales are motivated by and in what order.

John Tomasi: I would like to make a little, which ones, which ones are available and which, which ones are legitimately going to be used now and which ones are not going to be used now.

Azim Shariff: That's right. And which ones, which ones their department, is behind. because oftentimes, you know, the search committee puts together the ad and puts it out on behalf of the department. It would be good for the department, it'd be good for the search committee to know what the department actually is, is prioritizing.

John Tomasi: Right. It'd be good for them to know what's, what's legally permissible as a justification. And what the university's administration is behind and not behind.

Azim Shariff: That's right. Yeah. I, I also think it's important for them to prioritize, make a list of, because I think people will be convinced by multiple of these rationales. but it's important to prioritize, which are your, your, which is your top one. and then what's next, because it's all well and good to, to be motivated by multiple of these. But when you have to actually make concrete decisions, there's no candidate that's going to maximize all of these. And, and some of them can be intention with others. And so committing beforehand to, well, which, which rationale are we most motivated by, allows you then to know what, what your, your actual values are, know what your priorities are when it comes to making those concrete decisions.

John Tomasi: Interesting. As I read, as I read your paper and think about the categories that you lay out, I kept thinking on two levels. I kept thinking on the one level, it would be so useful in the committee that people could actually know these are the ones we're using and not those. So we share that in common rather than people speaking in script or in sort of hidden ways. But then I was also thinking that, you know, these criteria are so, they're, they're, they're controversial. There are, when the, when the university decides which forms of diversity it wants to be focusing on, whether racial diversity or intellectual diversity or ideological diversity or locational diversity or rural, all the different kinds of things we, you, you divide, you divide in the paper. So we're saying something about what the university's values are. And I think it'd be so helpful to have university actually be forced or at least encouraged or maybe empowered through your, your, your taxonomy to have those conversations in a more clear way. Like we are going to say, we're going to plump down for merit, let's say, or we're going to plump down for heterodoxy, whatever it might be, or they might plump down for social justice. At least they'd be saying that explicitly. Yeah. And there'd be legal questions, of course, they need to be within the law, but they'd also need to just sort of put their cards on the table and tell the public, this is what we're actually doing. I think there's a lot of, part of the mistrust, there's, you know, there's rising, there's Gallup polls you probably saw last summer showing this dramatic rise in distrust on our universities. I think over the past, the events since the Hamas attack and Israel's response has even, and the way university leaders have failed publicly to respond with statesmanship and elevated discourse and about that to these, these events, even raise that, that sense of distrust of universities even more. And if universities could be clearer about what it is they're doing to the public and justify, or at least attempt to justify what they're doing, I think that might help some of that mistrust.

Azim Shariff: I 100% agree. I think that hiding behind the doublespeak, not saying what we actually do prioritize and not even thinking clearly about what we do prioritize, what the values are, speaking in kind of sloganeering terms about diversity, hides a lot of the discussions that we should be having. Okay. In order to get on the same page, or at least to show what we stand for, I think right now when we say things like diversity is strength or diversity is excellence, these terms are kind of meaningless. All it says is that diversity is something good and we care about it. Diversity yay, or diversity nay. And we don't say what the diversity is, we don't say why we care about it, but these are things that if we're going to put this much into, we should explain why.

John Tomasi: Azim, it's been a pleasure having you on Heterodox Out Loud.