Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

“But Mark, you don’t seem to understand, these are good people. These are all good people.”  My interlocutor was a long-time administrator at my university, and an accomplished scholar. In his genial way he was trying to set my straight on some important facts. I had just learned that there would be a new aspect to our annual reports. We would be asked to tell our overlords how each one of our activities contributes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Teaching? How did it advance DEI? Scholarship? How did it help speed DEI on its way? If you get an honor or an award, you are to say how it contributed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Outside consulting: did it do any DEI duty? And what does the university mean by Diversity, by Equity, by Inclusion? The university doesn’t say. There are no official definitions out there to consider.  So I had a lot to tell my friend about administrative interference with academic freedom. I didn’t want the university deans and DEI enforcers setting the agenda for my teaching or my scholarship, or for anyone else’s. At the same time, I couldn’t really argue with my friend’s observation: the people in the dean’s office and the DEI enclaves are decent sorts. I like them. Was asking us to apply DEI standards to every aspect of our work a radical piece of over-reach? I think it was, and is: I fought against it at its inception and still do.  But I also see the move as part of a larger pattern of enforcing discipline, and that pattern may be more important than any single program or initiative. The good people who came up with this notion are — without knowing it, I suspect — softly tyrannizing us. They are also softly tyrannizing themselves. And what they are up to isn’t only a university matter. It is happening in corporations, medical centers, primary and secondary schools, foundations, and NGOs. Surveillance and discipline, carried out almost exclusively by good people, are becoming pervasive. In this case, the terms employed in that discipline were, ostensibly, progressive. The fact that most faculty members call themselves liberals or progressives makes the exercise more palatable to them. It makes it all seem virtuous. But it’s possible that the terms in play mean less than the process of ever-tightening scrutiny and control that is becoming a part of almost every enterprise that is administered by the good people of the world. They are “squeezing our shoes,” to borrow a phrase from David Foster Wallace, and getting their own shoes squeezed in the bargain.  The deans are good people, the DEI office is full of good people, the HR building’s no doubt populated by decent characters. And all these people are not ideologues. OK, some of them are virtue exhibitionists who put those In-Our-Family-We-Believe-That signs in front of their houses. And some get all misty when they say the word “black,” but probably not many, and even those who do have their virtues. Reactionaries think that a major plot, a real conspiracy, is afoot in the universities, and in the corporations too, to turn everyone into a lockstep leftist. There’s a tablespoon of truth in that. But I think that indoctrination to an ideology may not be the main issue here, not quite. People tune out professional droners. They make stuff up to fill in the Diversity square on the application. They mock the literal-minded hacks who spew institution-speak into the air like sterile seeds. When questioned they obtain services from the consulting firm of Duck and Hide. Subtly, quietly, you can evade the ideological indoctrination. But that is not the end of it. There is a dimension to institutional life now that is probably more consequential (and more pernicious), and that you cannot evade. You must participate in this part of the endeavor, as both subject and object. “I hate the builders of dungeons in the air.”  That is Ralph Waldo Emerson gently venting his disapproval at knee-jerk pessimists. He is not enamored of those who build castles in the air either, but Emerson, who has a predilection for hope, has no time for the born and bred nay-sayers.