Rufo Comes for Kentucky

Christopher Rufo has decided to take his act to Kentucky:

The University of Kentucky is in trouble. Though a conservative state legislature has been in power for more than a decade, university administrators have created a sprawling DEI bureaucracy that encourages racial discrimination in hiring and scholarships, attempts to control students’ “unconscious thoughts and behaviors” through mandatory diversity training, and even requires new building projects to allocate up to $1 million toward public artwork that pushes left-wing ideology.

I have obtained a trove of documents that reveals the University of Kentucky’s decades-long commitment to critical race theory—the doctrine that the United States is a systemically racist nation in dire need of “antiracist” discrimination in favor of preferred minority groups—and left-wing racialism.

The ideological takeover of the university began in 2003, with a new strategic plan that committed UK to building “a diverse workforce and learning community” and laid out a “first-ever diversity goal.” These are euphemisms. Far from the traditional academic commitment to diversity of thought, the University of Kentucky’s conception of diversity meant a new commitment to racial politics and discriminatory practices—affirmative action, informal quotas, and DEI hiring—at every level of the university, laying the groundwork for a strong bureaucracy with which to enforce these new values.

Since then, administrators have exploited the good will of state legislators and citizens, using the old language of racial equality in a new, misleading way. This became clear by 2006, when the university began expanding its DEI offices. In that year’s strategic plan, leadership declared that the adoption of “an organizational structure that supports diversity” would become “the shared responsibility of the entire community.” To that end, the university established “a coherent, focused, university-wide implementation strategy” to “enhance demographic diversity”—that is, to hire and recruit according, at least in part, to race rather than merit.

Don’t bother fact-checking because there’s no point. I want to assure everyone of a difficult reality: Christopher Rufo is not dumb. There’s no question that Rufo’s opposition to DEI is about theory, not execution. But his attacks find purchase (even among faculty who should know better) because the university administrative class has only one script for dealing with faculty: bureaucratic, authoritarian, and altogether punitive. American university faculty as a group are more ideologically heterogenous than most conservatives credit, but nevertheless, we’re probably the single collection of workers in the United States most sympathetic to the foundations and ends of DEI. University administrators, however, see DEI as a series of mandates that can be passed on to faculty and a collection of mechanisms that can be used to discipline and punish faculty as a class. A faculty member emerging from his ninth mandatory training this year (only three of which are about DEI; the rest probably involve some new software that the travel office has decided to purchase upon the advice of a regionally-known consulting firm), or who has been subjected to scrutiny and harassment because of specious concerns about “student safety” hears Rufo denouncing the DEI bureaucracy and, in a moment of weakness, thinks “yeah that guy is making sense.”

The extra layer of irony in Kentucky is that UK administration has settled upon “we need to eliminate shared governance in order to pre-empt complaints from the state legislature” as its preferred excuse for seizing power from faculty. This was always a lie, but it’s a useful and acceptable lie in a deep Red state where most of the faculty (justifiably) hate and fear the legislature anyway. But of course nothing that university administration does ever actually pre-empts or prevents the legislature from doing anything that it wants; we’ll undoubtedly get a new anti-DEI bill this year that will live or die on the internal dynamics of the legislative committee process.

But I think that diversity (as distinct from the DEI Bureaucracy that actually exists or the DEI Boogeyman that Rufo has helped conjure) requires a more affirmative defense than simply pointing out the bad faith of administrators and reactionary trolls. Historically, the Patterson School (my unit) was founded to support a certain kind of diversity.  The earliest leaders of the School were concerned that the intelligence and diplomatic institutions of the United States were too dependent on a few elite northeastern schools, and that this dependence deprived the national security and foreign policy bureaucracy of a set of necessary perspectives from Americans who lived in other parts of the country or who lacked the means to attend the small set of elite schools. The basic insight was that diversity is not merely desirable; it is necessary to the functioning of a bureaucracy of foreign policy and national security, an observation that extends to any profession in which people need to interact with people.  Without sufficiently representative voices, the bureaucracy cannot develop a full picture of its mission or of the necessary steps to securing that mission. A diversity that represents a more accurate understanding of the human terrain is, in a word, strength.

This particular vision helped produce a limited kind of diversity; students were mostly male and mostly white, but offered a richer set of geographic and economic perspectives. But once you crack the door open a bit the implications flow. Over the years the insight that strength requires diversity applies to an ever-wider swath of the American and indeed the global population. And that project requires a diverse faculty and requires a nuanced understanding of how and why race and gender matter for US national security. Carefully structured, well thought-out diversity initiatives are a strength for any bureaucracy that pursues them, and a defeat for the Christopher Rufos of the world.