I wrote yesterday about Bill Ackman and his support of Trump. One of Bill Ackman’s 33 reason why he dislikes the Biden/Harris agenda was:
#8 – “promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due to structural racism or a rigged system and the oppressed are simply victims of an unfair system and world.”
I have always respected and liked DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) as a concept and have been shocked and appalled by those who denigrate these efforts. I sort of understand where it comes from, but I still disagree with those concerns. A year or so ago I got an email from an old college fraternity buddy who has made his fortune in the realm of quantitative hedge fund trading. He was always a smart math wizard, but a strange duck nonetheless, always looking like he and his wispy frame would blow away under a stiff breeze. After the October 7th attack by Hamas on the people who lived in the area that borders Gaza (presumably in protest of the infringement of their safety zone with settlements being built right up to the Gaza border), I got a group email from him, sent to all those who he knew from our University. I was not surprised that he, as a Jewish man, was avidly pro-Israel, as many people, even those of us who are not Jewish, are generally pro-Israel. But his email denigrating the University administration for allowing and even giving airtime to the pro-Palestinian forces on campus that are strongly anti-Israel, was not unexpected in that sentiment, but was surprising in another. He took that dislike for the administration’s feeling that they needed to afford the pro-Palestinian faction their right to have their say and espouse their views for the need to curtail support for Israel in its efforts to root out Hamas at the cost of Gaza’s general population, and he connected that to the general DEI initiatives of the University. He quickly shifted the focus of the email to a rant about why DEI was destroying the fabric of the University, nay, the fabric of our country.
Earlier this year I travelled back to Cornell to attend the dedication of an office suite in Sage Hall in honor of my favorite Cornell professor and administrator, Joe Thomas. I have said many nice things about Joe over the years in my stories because I feel strongly about the guy and he stands out as one of my great role models in life. His field may be operations and manufacturing, something that only tangentially connects to the fields that I have focused on in my studies and career, so I have to admit that my admiration for him stems mostly from his qualities as a human being more so than as an academic. I didn’t know it until I was actually in Sage Hall at the ceremony, but the space he specifically chose to have his name attached to was the Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI). Joe’s remarks made it clear that he believed strongly in the work of the office and its importance to the school. I respected that decision and would suggest that if you met Joe you might never imagine that he is anything but a conservative and very pragmatic guy. There is nothing about him that screams that he is a pinko, socialist liberal. He is a down-to-earth man who is merely a good man that believes in solving problems and making the world a better place. Along the way as a professor of Operations, Technology and Information Management, or as an Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, or as Dean of the Johnson Graduate School of Management or as an interim Dean of the College of Business, he had somehow concluded that diversity and inclusion were valuable efforts to the challenges of running a University.
It is interesting the note that this center at the Cornell business school is focused on diversity and inclusion, but does not include the standard E for equity in its mission. Since the ODI got its start at Cornell’s business school in 1991 as the Office of Women and Minorities in Business and DEI really got its start with the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-60’s, you would think that they would have named it ODEI rather than ODI when they renamed it in 2005, but they didn’t. Equity in the context of DEI means the concept of fairness and impartiality in the distribution of resources and opportunities. It recognizes that people have different starting points in life, and that not everyone has the same access to opportunities. This is a Great Society concept that I got to see first hand in 1965 – 1968 when we lived in Poland Spring, Maine and my mother ran the first Women’s Job Corps Center there. It was a very ambitious residential program for 1,200 mostly inner-city women between 16-21. They came for either one or two years to both learn an employable trade and to become indoctrinated into modern American society with all the norms and values that the 1960’s liberal ideology thought were important for integration of people of lesser means into the mainstream of American society. They were, effectively, being reprogrammed to be good suburbanite citizens who brushed their teeth twice a day and always washed their hands after using the bathroom. I remember my mother telling me as we headed to Rome for her next job as a UN diplomat that the Job Corps concept as attempted was ill-conceived. She came away feeling that reprogramming people was beyond both unreasonable and impossible. She felt the job training was good, but the life training was not. In fact, the Job Corps moved in that direction from that point on and became a non-resident program, leaving life changes to our general culture and the people involved. She believed Equity was best earned naturally rather than superimposed.
The concept of fixing inequity is appealing, but the reality seems too hard. It is clearly the rubbing point of most DEI with people like my fraternity brother and Bill Ackman. I think it wise that Joe Thomas and Cornell business school seem to have come to that same conclusion in setting up their ODI. Inclusion in hard to disagree with, but diversity remains a potentially difficult concept for some people to understand. But I just read an article about the new Nobel Prizes awarded in Physics and Chemistry. It seems that four of the five Nobels awarded in those areas involved people who used AI to generate their groundbreaking and impactful research. The comment that jumped out at me was that what AI does in include and combine the work of thousands of scientists (in one case 30,000 biologists) to come to its scientific breakthroughs. Imagine how please that should make our quantitative and data-driven friends like Joe, Bill and my Quant Hedge Fund buddy? And that’s when it struck me. The secret to successful innovation through AI was the full breadth of diversity that it manages to harness to crack the various puzzles of science. That may be the best evidence that many of us have felt for years is the real strength of diversity. Nature understands the value of diversity. Biologists get it. Man has witnessed it in building social mores against incest and inbreeding. And now AI has shown us that it’s contribution may well be the institutionalization of the value of diversity. Therefore, I’m going to be the first to say that AI may be the Trojan Horse in which diversity gets back into the good graces of naysayers like Bill Ackman.