It’s no secret that President Trump has been targeting American universities in an effort to crackdown on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies. The response has been mixed, with a few schools like Harvard promising to resist, while others have caved and renamed their DEI bureaucracy “The Office of Belonging” or something similar. Like most other cultural issues during the last decade, opinion over university DEI is polarized, which is to say that many people, especially loudest voices, seem incapable of having a reasonable discussion over it. But it’s far from clear how we’ll ever be able to.

I’ve had about a month to decompress after witnessing my institute’s own faculty senate argue over the inclusion DEI language on my institute’s website and in its strategic plan. It was a debate that one of my colleagues later referred to as “kabuki theater,” and, indeed, like politics today more generally, the conversation was far more performance than the kind of dialogue one would hope could occur among the most highly educated people in the state. And if they were incapable of a sensible conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion, what hope is there for the rest of America?

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DEI has a lot of problems. Among the most significant is that there is very little evidence that current practices work. Musa al-Gharbi surveyed much of the literature on DEI trainings back in 2020. He found that ineffectiveness wasn’t even the worst of the issue with DEI. Often these trainings decreased cooperation across racial lines, increased resentment of poor whites, heightened feelings of alienation and anxiety among minority workers, and sometimes even generated greater fatalism about racial bias. To top it off, a good number of workers now simply simulate progressive beliefs to please DEI bean counters.

There’s a DEI committee at my own university, and like other institutions of higher learning, we have a few well-paid DEI administrators. To my best recollection, these committees and offices have never provided evidence that their efforts have had an impact on recruiting and retaining students from non-privileged backgrounds. I actually have no idea what they do.

The only noteworthy occurrence was an all-staff email thread from the DEI office that turned in a struggle session when one poor bastard, failing to read the peak-woke-era room, sent out a cliché meme about us all being the same on the inside. I seriously worried that we’d find him hanging from a rope in his office.

Going into the faculty senate discussion, part of me hoped that practical considerations about whether DEI was actually working might be part of the conversation. Instead, we sat through a half hour of culture warring. It didn’t help that the instigation for the debate was from a professor who referred to DEI as an “ideology.”

Left-wing faculty swooped in to defend DEI as morally equivalent to civil rights in the 60’s, as no different from supporting diversity in general, and as the same as following the ten commandments or other non-negotiable ethical frameworks. Others accused DEI skeptics of carrying water for the Trump administration. It was like a real life reenactment of a Bluesky thread.

Most fascinating (and tragic) about the exchange is that the relevant literature, including al-Gharbi’s survey, was circulated prior to the meeting. But it didn’t matter. The battle lines had already been drawn over what DEI symbolized, not its actual impacts.

To me, it felt like an illustration of what philosophy Liam Kofi Bright referred to as the “white psychodrama” characterizing today’s culture war over race: a largely symbolic fight between members of the intelligentsia over “how to psychologically manage the results of living in a materially deeply unequal society, not a conflict about how or whether to reduce that material inequality.”

What I think Bright would say about debates over university DEI departments is that they are, for the most part, materially unimportant for minority groups. Much of the literature suggests that DEI practices are largely performative efforts to help left-wing managers and employees assuage their feelings of guilt and believe that they are battling discrimination, which means that they’re one of the “good guys.” Their staunchest opponents, however, aren’t much better, seeking to downplay ongoing inequalities with insistences on color-blindness and efforts to avoid talking about race at all.

This is similar to what al-Gharbi argues in his book We Have Never Been Woke. Wokeness hasn’t achieved woke political goals. Instead, it seems to have been mostly an elite status game, an elaborate system of etiquette valuable more for signaling one’s virtues than actually practicing them. The fact that Harvard is freezing the wages of their custodians, who are disproportionately nonwhite, while maintaining an army of highly paid DEI staff is emblematic of al-Gharbi’s point about the contradictions of the woke era.

Yet, on reflection, it was naïve of me to think that a constructive discussion of DEI would have been feasible, given that a large chunk of America’s symbolic analysts are staunchly committed to one side or another of the psychodrama. Trump’s effort to strong arm universities into dismantling DEI has negatively polarized much of the left-wing electorate into wanting to defend it. The situation is little different from populist reaction to vaccine mandates, albeit with vastly more affluent and educated citizens now seeing themselves as in the resistance.

Part of me wonders if this is what Trump wants, more so than actually dismantling DEI: that the left rallies behind a set of diversity-promoting activities that only a small minority of Americans believe to be effective.

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What to do? During the COVID pandemic, I was one of only a few voices arguing that we had no hope of persuading vaccine skeptics by trying to reveal their ignorance or accuse them of being deluded by conspiracy theorists and misinformation. Their hesitancy had far more to do with feelings of mistrust in Anthony Fauci and the FDA, with the sense that they had no input in the public decisions that were upending their lives and threatening their livelihoods.

Vaccine hesitancy was made worse during the pandemic, because most advocates refused to try to understand skeptics as human beings—instead treating them as mere disease vectors.

Finding our way out of the unproductive mess that is the contemporary debate over diversity, equity, and inclusion is a similar scale of challenge. But I’m currently at a loss to understand the loudest voices in that debate in a charitable way. Liam Bright chalks the situation up to cognitive dissonance. Philosopher Dan Williams would probably label it an issue of “highbrow misinformation,” where educated elites fall prey to their own version of groupthink.

I’m not happy with any of those explanations, because they strike me as patronizing, as repeating the pandemic-era mistake with vaccine skeptics. Even if there is a kernel of truth to seeing the battle over DEI as a product of status-seeking, black-and-white thinking, and other personal deficiencies, recognizing as such doesn’t suggest any productive pathways forward. As I wrote in my second book, the only hope for bringing people back from the brink of fanaticism is by meeting them halfway, not by diagnosing them as cognitively broken. Only by understanding them as reasonable people can we do that.

So, how might a discussion over DEI turn out differently? Psychologist Peter Coleman contends that difficult conversations are only possible by reframing our political disputes as complex layered sets of trade-offs and dilemmas, rather than black-and-white debates over truth and falsity or good versus evil. The only way that faculty at my university and others will be up for the challenge of tough discussions about diversity, equity, and inclusion is in an environment that reawakens our curiosity about the challenges and quandaries inherent in those ideas, and pushes us out of the ruts of our deeply rooted political divides.

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