Stanford profs condemn DEI at school, say it can lead to anti-Semitism

Two Stanford University professors are attacking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), claiming that it promotes anti-Semitism. 

In an Aug. 30 op-ed published in The New York Times, Stanford professors Paul Brest and Emily J. Levine argue that “American campuses need an alternative to ideological D.E.I. programs.”

Brest, former dean and professor emeritus at Stanford Law School, and Levine, a lecturer on history and education, were appointed to Stanford’s subcommittee on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias following increased anti-Semitism at the campus after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.

[RELATED: California Assembly unanimously approved bill to add anti-Semitism to college DEI trainings]

They argue that “D.E.I. programs often assign participants to identity categories based on rigid distinctions,” and mention that “[i]n a D.E.I. training program at Stanford a few years ago, Jewish staff members were assigned to a ‘whiteness accountability’ group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism.”

“The former D.E.I. director at a Bay Area community college described D.E.I. as based on the premises ‘that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.’ She was also told by colleagues and campus leaders that ‘Jews are ‘white oppressors,’ and her task was to ‘decenter whiteness.’”

“Rather than correcting stereotypes, diversity training too often reinforces them and breeds resentment, impeding students’ social development,” they continue. 

Brest and Levine continue to argue that DEI programs can be counterproductive, hurting the supposed beneficiaries of such initiatives by “instilling a victim mind-set and pitting students against one another.”

As an alternative to current DEI programs, the Stanford professors argue that American colleges and universities need programs based “on a pluralistic vision of the university community combined with its commitments to academic freedom and critical inquiry.”

Discussing the harmful effects DEI can have, Brest told Campus Reform: ”To the extent that you start with the notion that some students are oppressors [or oppressed], or colonizers or colonized, it instills the victim mindset in the people who are colonized, and it obviously pits students who are identified as oppressors against those who are oppressed.”

”One of the criticisms that we have of DEI programs is that . . . they come with a prepackaged view of the history of discrimination based on race, sex, sexual identity and the like. [Those are] issues that ought to be treated in a critical and evidence-based way in the classroom. But instead, students are taught what to think about those and that’s . . . the fundamental effect of DEI training.”

Brest and Levine are not the only Stanford staff members to take aim at the way Stanford runs DEI programs. 

In 2021, Dr. Ronald Albucher and Sheila Levin, who are respectively the former director and a former manager for Stanford’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) program, filed complaints against the school related to its DEI programs. 

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At that time, they wrote that when one of them contacted CAPS’s DEI Program to “express interest in becoming a better ally to other marginalized groups,” a DEI official condemned supposed Jewish “immense power and privilege” and said: “You are a part of the systemic racism and oppression that takes place in this country.” 

Levin told The Algemeiner that “I was placed in the white affinity group based on the idea that I can hide behind my white identity … and I was very disturbed by this because my parents survived World War II in the UK, which ended eleven years before I was born, and people like us were murdered because we were seen as contaminants to the white race. Not only did that feel like a betrayal to my heritage but to my parents.” 

Campus Reform has contacted Brest and Levine for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.