We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.

Why We Should be Skeptical of the "Politician's Logic" that Drives Campus DEI

“Diversity-training programs are now practically a rite of passage for college faculty and staff members, yet the evidence that they are effective is underwhelming.” This was the opening line to a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article called “Does Diversity Training Work?”

Why, in spite of the “underwhelming” evidence, have so many colleges and universities continued to embrace diversity trainings? One answer is “politician’s logic,” a kind of thinking that was brilliantly skewered in a 1988 episode of the BBC sitcom Yes, Minister. Two longtime civil servants chat over snifters of brandy:

Sir Arnold Robinson: “It’s the old logical fallacy. All cats have four legs. My dog has four legs…”

Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Therefore my dog is a cat.”

Robinson: “He’s suffering from politician’s logic.”

Appleby: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.”

Here’s the original clip:

This exchange introduced the incisive, evergreen term politician’s logic, also known as the politician’s syllogism or the politician’s fallacy. This logic, alas, has underpinned the massive expansion of campus DEI plans and initiatives since the murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020.¹ While some of these initiatives are welcome and long overdue (especially more robust efforts to recruit and retain historically-excluded and marginalized student and faculty populations), too many have been virtue-signaling, window-dressing. Diversity training is the quintessential example of the latter.

Frank Dobbin at Harvard and Alexandra Kalev at Tel-Aviv University are two of the leading experts on diversity training. In 2022, they published a book called Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t. According to Dobbin and Kalev: “Employers mandate training in the belief that people hostile to the message will not attend voluntarily.” But decades of research, they report, shows that compelling people to come “will do more harm than good.” Mandatory training programs, in their words, “often antagonize trainees and have been shown not to change minds or reduce misbehavior.” (Most discouragingly, research in the corporate world makes clear that diversity trainings have not moved the needle in terms of attracting and retaining more employees of color, especially at the management level.)

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Diversity trainings rely on what Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called the banking model of education. In this model, teachers (or trainers) are the unassailable experts—their job is to deposit knowledge into the heads of their students. Every question has a clear “right” or “wrong” answer. The job of the student is to receive, store and reproduce the knowledge on command.

From an administrative perspective, the banking model is ideal. It turns DEI “education” into an assembly line. If administrators want to signal an institution’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, what could possibly be more convenient than hiring outside consultants to deliver a pre-packaged curriculum? Here is how things play out, per the politician’s fallacy:

• take a real problem (higher ed’s shameful history of racial exclusion and marginalization)

• propose an easily-implemented, box-ticking solution (diversity training)

• defend the solution as an institutional—and moral—imperative (if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem)

As colleges and universities pursue the urgent task of diversifying their communities, college stakeholders should subject all new and ongoing DEI initiatives to the politician’s logic test. Yes, we must do something. But is that something this? To make up our minds, we will need to take a hard look at the evidence and leave PR concerns and wishful thinking by the wayside.

1. It looks like colleges and universities are going to double down on diversity training (and other DEI initiatives) this academic year in an effort to combat campus antisemitism. This is a mistake, as a recent New York Times opinion piece by two thoughtful, good-faith critics of DEI makes clear. Paul Brest, professor emeritus at Stanford Law School and Emily Levine, associate professor of education and history at Stanford, both served on Stanford’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias. They report that many campus stakeholders urged the subcommittee to add Jews and Israelis to “the identities currently recognized by Stanford’s D.E.I. programs so their harms would be treated with the same concern as those of people of color and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people.” While recognizing that many Jewish members of the Stanford community “experienced bias and feel insecure on our campus,” Brest and Levine maintain that “subsuming new groups into the traditional D.E.I. regime would only reinforce a flawed system.” The system is flawed, according to Brest and Levine, because conventional DEI programs are so ideological that they interfere with the university mission to promote critical thinking. What’s more, DEI offices rely far too much on off-the-shelf trainings “more suitable for airline safety briefings” than exploring the complexities of bias, discrimination and social justice.