Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Diversity is a concept that's at ground zero of our political wars in recent years, and my guest today has written a history and a spirited defense of the idea. David Oppenheimer is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a new book titled, “The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea.” Professor Oppenheimer, welcome to the program.

David Oppenheimer: Thank you very much. It's a delight to be here with you.

GR: Well, we really appreciate you making the time. So, I want to set the stage for our listeners by doing one thing myself here, and then I'll start asking you questions. But I wanted to read what you name as the diversity principle, and it's the very first page of your book. And so, it's a short paragraph. I'll read that, and then I'll come in and ask you a question after that. Here's the diversity principle, “People with different backgrounds, experiences and viewpoints benefit from engaging with each other. That's why it's important for people who are insiders to expand their circles to include outsiders, and vice versa. The experience of being an outsider is often influenced by age, religion, ethnicity, gender, race, language, disability, economic class, and other forms of identity. Compared with groups that are more homogeneous, diverse groups do a better job of solving problems, making discoveries, teaching and learning from each other, and improving democratic discourse.” A very good summary I think of an idea that is somewhat slippery at times. So let me ask you this to start, you tell a history of this principle and this idea, where and with whom does your story start?

DO: Well, my story starts with Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the great figures of the German or Prussian Enlightenment and the founder of the University of Berlin in 1810, where he decided to create an experiential university which has become the model for research universities around the world, and decided to include Catholics and Jews in order to benefit from a more diverse learning community.

GR: Interesting, okay. And so, my next question is going to force you to kind of take something that you spend almost 200 pages writing about, but to condense it into a reasonably brief answer. How does this concept then wind its way into higher education more generally? That's the University of Berlin, but where do we go from there?

DO: So, Humboldt influences John Stuart Mill and Charles Eliot, the transformative 19th century president of Harvard University. Eliot takes Humboldt's ideas and applies them at Harvard, and transforms Harvard from a sort of a sleepy college into a great university through bringing in, again, Catholic students and Jewish students and faculty and black people and immigrants and poor people with scholarships. And when he steps down, says that the thing he's most proud of about Harvard is the deep diversity in terms of racial and ethnic and religious and class diversity. And once it becomes part of the DNA of Harvard, it spreads to other American universities, it spreads to free speech law, it spreads to academic freedom law, it spreads to civil law, to civil rights law. And it all carries from there from Humboldt and Mill, or the Mills, to Eliot.

GR: And then in your story, you kind of locate this as you just did in the academy. And, you know, the things that you just articulated are things that we would associate with almost any university in the United States with, you know, a couple of exceptions, I guess. But then how and why does commerce and science come on board this diversity train that was originally put on the tracks by the academy?

DO: Well, businesses figured out the value of diversity through business school professors who were one foot in the university and one foot in the world of commerce. There was this early, very influential article called, ‘From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity’. And once business school professors and then psychology professors started testing the idea that diversity really has measurable value, they found that it did. They found that companies, for example, with more diverse boards and more diverse C-suites and more diverse management, made more money. And that was the point of what they were doing. And scientists, one, began studying diversity in many environments and finding that it really made a difference, and two, finding that in science, in science labs that were more diverse, they were making more important discoveries.

GR: Interesting. And then one of the things that I wanted to see if you had any thoughts about, I was thinking of some of my own discoveries about diversity that I've made along the way, and one of the ones that kind of surprised me when I first came upon it was in the workplace in the United States, you could argue that really one of the biggest leaders is the United States government. That they do quite well in comparison with the private sector. And not only if we think about the military, but the civilian workforce as well. I don't know if you had any comments about that.

DO: Well, one, I completely agree that the U.S. military, has been much more diverse and has done a much better job of creating opportunity for women and for black Americans and Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans than private industry. And then second, yes, the government, all the way back to the reconstruction period, and with the exception of the Wilson administration, which was really terrible toward black federal employees, but with that exception the government has had a more diverse workforce, and has been better at having rules that required employment decisions to be made, looking at a broad pool instead of simply, oh, I've got a friend who could work for us, let's hire him.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is University of California at Berkeley law professor David Oppenheimer, and we're discussing his new book. It's titled, “The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea.” So, you have kind of a two-pronged way of talking about this concept. And it's, you know, the way that it gets argued about. And one is sort of as an issue of fairness and as an issue of justice. But you've also emphasized the fact that, hey, you know, it's not just a good thing to do, it's good for business, it will make you more money. And so there's the self-interested aspect of it from a collective perspective. I was wondering if you had some reflections on, as this concept then is wending its way and becoming more and more accepted in different kinds of realms of our lives, is there an impact back on the concept itself? Does the concept itself go through any formative changes in that process?

DO: Well, it certainly has, from an idea that seemed like a good idea into the business world, where it was very heavily analyzed by the business consultancies who were training, HR people and training businesses and looking for feedback. And that's how we saw the movement from a diversity principle to diversity, equity and inclusion. As businesses concluded and their consultants concluded that they were recruiting a more diverse workforce, but they weren't bringing them into the community of the workforce so that there was no sense of inclusion. And in the absence of inclusion, they weren't fully gaining the benefits of diversity.

GR: Interesting, interesting. And I wanted to pick up on that. You know, you mentioned DEI, it's obviously a, you know, like a flashing neon light political phrase right now. Do you think that this concept has suffered in recent years with what many people perceive as a hyper focus, especially on the left, on gender, race and sexual orientation as the be all and end all of diversity that, you know, has that sort of weakened the strength of the concepts some way, do you think?

DO: Well, certainly it's important that we recognize that there are all kinds of diversity and all kinds of diversity contributes to the diversity effect. So, for example, there's a criticism that American universities are too left.

GR: Yeah, I want to come back to that a bit later, but go ahead.

DO: Okay, Well I'm sorry to jump ahead.

GR: Oh no, it's fine, it's good.

DO: But certainly, I agree and I probably agree more from having studied diversity, that we need conservative voices on our faculties in order to, one, improve our own research as professors, because we're hearing voices that today we're not perhaps hearing enough. And two, improve the teaching of our students. So just as it's important that women's voices be heard, just as it's important that racial minorities be included in the community, just as it's important that people with disabilities be part of the community. I think it's also important that there be political and ideological diversity in order to gain fully the benefits of diversity.

GR: Yeah, I wanted to come back to that. I wanted to ask you a different question, though, might be related to it in a way. And it's about the academy, and it's based in part on my own experience, but you've already alluded to it. In this focus on certain kinds of diversity, there also seems to me to be a return and an embrace of what I thought as a society, we were trying to w...

David Oppenheimer on the Campbell Conversations