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The final Harvard Kennedy School Dean’s Discussion of the semester addressed the relationship of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) to academic freedom, and put the spotlight on difficult conversations dealing with racial justice in education—including on the Harvard campus.  

Professors Danielle Allen, Arthur Applbaum MPP 1982 PhD 1988, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad provided historic context, defined usage, and offered real-life examples of DEIB principles in action. Sarah Wald, senior policy advisor, chief of staff, and adjunct lecturer in public policy, moderated.  

Wald asked the faculty panelists to first identify what they saw as the distinctions between freedom of speech and academic freedom.  

“Some people think that academic freedom is simply the local instantiation of free speech,” began Applbaum, the Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values. “I think there are interactions, but we need to keep them separate.”  

He defined freedom of speech as a constitutional right we have against governments to say pretty much whatever we want: “It doesn't have to be speech of particularly high epistemic value,” in other words, it does not necessarily have to be based in knowledge.

“Academic freedom is the idea that we should be free to engage in open and rigorous inquiry,” Applbaum said, “what Habermas calls the unforced forced of the better argument.”  It is the exercise of the power of reason, and “when it works, it has high epistemic value, even if it turns out that we're not actually speaking the truth.”

Applbaum argued that the power of reason may need to be protected from protest speech, which is mainly the exercise of causal power. “Free speech often is pursued through causal power,” the use of incentives and disincentives, political mobilization, and the exercise of political pressure. “Free speech often gets in the way of academic freedom.”
 

Muhammad, the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy, considered the context of college campuses.

“Free speech exists within a constitutional framework and governs notions of liberal democracy and open societies,” he noted, “Academic freedom is also the protection of faculty to do unpopular research. Its core value in a university setting is to ensure that powerful people do not crush the act of research itself by asking certain questions that will question the power arrangements in and of themselves.”  

Using a story from her own college years, Allen, professor of public policy at ����vlog����, and the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, illustrated a point about free speech and academic freedom. While at Princeton working on her senior thesis, she was called a racist word. She said she was not hurt by the hateful insult because she felt she was part of a trusted community.  

“I realized that for anybody who doesn't have that basic level of trust in their community, that moment would've been quite damaging, destabilizing, unsettling, and affect the ability to continue work on the thesis,” she said.  

Academic freedom, she said, protects the ability to follow your curiosity wherever it leads. “Freedom of expression is about the public sphere,” said Allen. “We have to deal with problematic, discriminatory, and harassing speech on campus to protect the space where people are trying to pursue academic freedom.”  

Wald then moved the conversation towards the role of DEIB efforts, and Muhammad provided historical context.  

Emerging from the 1960s civil rights movement, the United States more formally examined how to address diversity in the face of discrimination. “Under [President] Johnson you get the first rationale for essentially an affirmative effort to address the ways in which legalized  discrimination had minimized, and in some cases, eliminated opportunities for people based on race,” said Muhammad.  

Federal efforts on affirmative action became more prominent under President Nixon, especially in the construction trades. In the realm of higher education, a landmark 1978 Supreme Court decision, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, ruled it unconstitutional for a university to use racial quotas but held that affirmative action programs could be constitutional.  
 

“On one hand, the Court essentially rejects quotas as a form of discrimination, and they embrace a concept that Justice Powell argued is a diversity rationale,” explained Muhammad. It's of compelling interest, he noted, that our institutions reflect the diversity of the society we live in. “This has benefits that will accrue to both the institution and the individual students.”

The Court's Decision, to some degree, brought a cohort of Black people to higher education and prominent professional positions in an unprecedented way. 

But with diversity came discomfort. Muhammad recalled the 2014 “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign, calling out instances of microaggressions experienced by Black Harvard students. “Microaggressions were becoming a national problem,” said Muhammad, referring to indirect forms of discrimination and the ways in which people of color had to justify their existence, their right to be on campus.  

A newer framing highlighting equity, he continued, demonstrates a more committed institutional focus on the policies and practices of institutions. By shifting from “equality” to “equity” institutions were figuring out what policies and practices were needed to make sure that everyone got access to opportunities.  

Allen brought up the politicization of DEIB activities. “If you look at Trump's 2020 executive order, one of the last things he did before leaving office, he banned diversity and inclusion training in federal agencies,” she said. “And one of President Biden's first executive orders in January 2021 is the Equity Action Plan to advance equity for all.  

“That is the issue of DEI,” she continued. “They're a good thing to be annoyed about and to rile people up with, and there's a lot of political mileage that you can get from doing so.”  

Applbaum noted that Justice Powell’s deciding opinion in the Bakke case introduced the educational benefits of a diverse student body as the sole justification for taking race into account in university admissions, a view that no other justice completely endorsed.  Powell excluded considerations of past societal discrimination or of achieving proportionality.

“We are trapped into using diversity as our term of art because it is the only constitutionally sound term that we can use,” he said.

“With the Harvard [Supreme Court] case last year [rejecting affirmative action programs], even diversity has been taken off the table,” Applbaum continued. “Now we're stuck with a term,” but we can't explicitly use race in our admissions even for diversity.  

“And,” he continued, “we have spent decades not being internally transparent because there are certain kinds of conversations that we can't have …. The court has demanded that we talk in terms of diversity, but I think it's been distorting and has shrunk the domain over which we can have these conversations.”

Wald “officially ended” this last discussion of the seven-year Dean’s Discussion series by thanking Dean Doug Elmendorf for his leadership in creating this series for the ����vlog���� community to engage in meaningful, enlightened conversation on topical issues.  

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Photos by Winston Tang