Class Analysis Without Permission

In 2019, the University of Michigan employed a larger number of diversity, equity, and inclusion staff than it employed faculty in its history department. This is not unusual. It is illustrative. Across American higher education, administrative positions tied to compliance, diversity, and inclusion have grown faster than faculty hiring and faster than student enrollment for decades. The Delta Cost Project documented the broader administrative expansion. The specific DEI acceleration after 2020 is visible in university budget reports and organizational charts that anyone can read. The numbers are not contested. What is contested is whether you are allowed to find them interesting.
That is where the analysis begins.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory holds that moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, stabilize internal alignment, and justify control over institutional domains. They do not need to be philosophically consistent. They need to be effective. Stephen Turner’s work on expertise and jurisdiction explains what happens once a coalition secures a foothold. It converts moral claims into turf. Administrative bodies assert specialized authority over a domain, then treat challenges to that authority not as empirical disagreements but as norm violations. There is no neutral ground above the conflict because the institution itself defines the terms of legitimacy.
Together these frameworks predict something specific. The people best positioned to analyze these arrangements are the people least likely to do so because the analysis would threaten their own coalitions. The people willing to do it often lack the analytical discipline to stay focused on structure and incentives, and slide instead into the kind of hostile group essentialism that discredits the observation along with the observer. The result is a gap in the literature exactly where the analysis would be most revealing. This is an attempt to fill it.
The moral language of DEI regimes is worth examining first, not because the language is insincere, but because its flexibility is diagnostic. Pinsof’s framework does not require hypocrisy to explain inconsistency. It predicts inconsistency as a feature of coalition maintenance.
Consider how equity operates. In admissions and hiring it means preferring group representation over individual qualification. In STEM rankings and Nobel Prize celebrations it quietly steps aside for meritocracy. The same administrators who treat statistical disparities in faculty demographics as prima facie evidence of systemic bias treat statistical disparities in physics or mathematics achievement as a complex problem requiring further study rather than immediate correction. This is not confusion. It is coalition management. Meritocracy remains available as a value when it serves internal status hierarchies. Equity displaces it when it serves coalition expansion. The language is deployed where it is useful and holstered where it is not.
Lived experience works similarly. It overrides replicable evidence when a constituency’s testimony is being mobilized for institutional change. It becomes less authoritative when the lived experience in question is that of a student or faculty member who found a mandatory training counterproductive, a bias-response system punitive, or a speech code chilling. In that case the institution pivots from testimonial authority to structural analysis, explaining that individual discomfort does not override collective need. The same epistemological move that was sacred in one context is unavailable in the other. Again, not contradiction. Coalition technology.
Harm has expanded furthest and most consequentially. Its extension from physical injury to speech, statistical representation, and psychological discomfort is not primarily a philosophical development. It is a jurisdictional one. Each expansion of the harm category creates a rationale for ongoing administrative oversight and, crucially, for the permanent employment of the people qualified to diagnose and remediate it. The implicit bias trainer, the bias-response coordinator, the chief diversity officer, the DEI consultant: all depend on a definition of harm capacious enough to require their continuous intervention. Turner would note that this is exactly how jurisdictional claims work. The expertise and the problem it addresses co-produce each other.
The institutional network sustaining this arrangement is publicly traceable. It does not require inference about motives or coordination. The connections are visible in grant records, board memberships, personnel histories, and organizational filings.
The Ford Foundation has directed hundreds of millions of dollars toward academic centers, training programs, and advocacy organizations working within the DEI framework. The MacArthur and Mellon foundations run parallel programs. These foundations share board members and program officers with the universities whose intellectual frameworks they fund, creating a feedback loop in which the academic concepts that justify the funding are developed by institutions that depend on the funding. This is not a conspiracy. It is an ecosystem. The participants do not need to coordinate explicitly because the incentive structure does the coordination for them.
Federal agencies, particularly the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, translate this conceptual framework into compliance obligations that universities and corporations adopt and expand. The revolving door between OCR and university general counsel offices, between foundation program officers and university diversity administrators, between corporate HR departments and the consulting firms that service both, is documented in personnel records that anyone can trace. Administrators move through this network carrying the same conceptual vocabulary, the same training certifications, the same professional associations, and the same institutional incentives.
The result is what a British journalist would simply call a class fraction. A specific stratum of highly credentialed, institutionally embedded professionals whose material interests align with the expansion of the administrative domain they control. Peter Oborne diagrams the Eton-to-Westminster pipeline and calls it sociology. C. Wright Mills traces the interlocking directorates of the American power elite and calls it political science. The identical move applied to the DEI administrative network gets reframed as an attack on vulnerable people. That asymmetry is itself the phenomenon worth explaining.
The British tradition of class analysis does not require moral clearance before the diagramming begins. You identify the schools, the foundations, the regulatory bodies, the consulting firms, and the career paths connecting them. You note who benefits from the arrangement and how it reproduces itself. You observe that the moral language justifying the arrangement is also doing protective work, insulating the concentration of authority from the kind of scrutiny that other concentrations of authority routinely receive. Then you publish it and someone writes a sharp response and the debate happens in public where it belongs.
The American system inserts an additional step. Before you may describe the network you must first affirm the moral framework that legitimates it. Failure to do so converts the description into an attack. The sociology becomes suspect. The data becomes weaponized. The analyst becomes the subject of the analysis. This is the protection mechanism in its purest form. It does not prevent the description from being accurate. It raises the cost of accuracy high enough that most people inside the institutions find it easier not to try.
None of this requires any claim about what the participants consciously intend. Actors respond to incentives. Coalitions form around shared interests dressed in shared moral language. Institutions expand their jurisdiction when expansion is rewarded and contraction is punished. The system sustains itself not because everyone is coordinating toward a predetermined outcome but because the incentive structure selects for the behaviors that reproduce it. That is Turner’s point and it is Pinsof’s point and it is the point that the DEI literature, produced almost entirely within the institutions it might otherwise describe, consistently fails to reach.
The University of Michigan’s diversity staff outnumber its history faculty. The Delta Cost Project data shows this pattern is not an aberration. It is the output of a system working exactly as Pinsof and Turner would predict. A coalition formed around a moral vocabulary. The vocabulary justified a jurisdictional claim. The jurisdiction created jobs, budgets, and career paths. The jobs, budgets, and career paths created constituencies with strong incentives to defend the jurisdiction. Challenges to the jurisdiction get reframed as norm violations. The system closes.
What British class analysis would add is the obvious question the American system cannot ask without triggering its own enforcement mechanism. Who specifically built this network, who funds it, who moves through it, and what do they get from it. Not as a moral indictment. As sociology. The answer is in the public record. The analysis simply requires someone willing to read it without first obtaining coalition permission.
The next cases follow the same structure. The moralization of misinformation and the rise of content moderation regimes. The expansion of ESG frameworks in finance. The post-1964 civil rights administrative state as a durable source of bureaucratic authority. Each involves the same pattern. Moral vocabulary defines the stakes. Coalitions form around the vocabulary. Institutions claim jurisdiction. And the ability to describe the system in plain language becomes the most contested act of all.