Nathan Cofnas writes in the Wall Street Journal Aug. 21 that he rejects DEI in favor of treating people as individuals.
That triggered me hard, bro. It’s a lovely sentiment but it is not possible in this fallen world.
I have a rich fantasy life, but even I don’t entertain this ideal of treating people like individuals. It’s too tiring. I’m an old man. I don’t have the energy to start treating people like individuals until they become important to me, and only a small number of people become important to me. Otherwise, I rely on stereotypes, like everybody else, because they’re good enough.
Two paragraphs later Cofnas reports that under a colorblind system judging applicants only on grades and test scores, Harvard would be 0.7 percent African-American, a figure he takes from an internal Harvard study disclosed during Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The number exists because somebody sorted applicants by race and ran the counterfactual. A man who treats people as individuals has no use for it. Later in the same piece he argues for measures ensuring meaningful representation of major demographic groups so that everyone feels a voice in collective decisions, which is a quota.
The diversity coalition says group remedy for group injury. Disparities in enrollment and hiring trace to historical exclusion, so the institution acts on the group to correct the group. Then challenge any particular hire and the answer arrives in the individual register: this scholar was assessed on the merits, cleared every bar, and the suggestion that race did any work in the file is an insult. Harvard argued both in one litigation. Race is one factor among many, never determinative, holistic. Also indispensable, since the internal simulation showed what removing it does.
Institutions typically address two audiences with one document and a lot of words about values. Public legitimacy runs on individual assessment, because a credential that anyone believes came from a group allocation is unsayable. Distribution of goodies runs on group accounting. Say the first alone and the program has no rationale. Say the second alone and every graduate carries an asterisk. So the institution says both, in different rooms, to different listeners, and never in the same paragraph. The arrangement is stable so long as nobody puts the two paragraphs side by side.
Cofnas has the same problem in reverse. He needs group data to establish mismatch and needs individualism to keep the position morally clean. He says the story was never about Arday. A man who treats people as individuals cannot use a man that way. His practice is group inference with an individual disclaimer.
The arrangement holds until reality rears its ugly head. Jason Arday was announced in 2023 as the youngest Black professor in the history of Cambridge, and the announcement did group work. It was repeated by every outlet that covered the appointment. When the record came under question, the group frame supplied no defense. The defense had to be individual, and the individual defense depended on a file that could not carry it. So the argument moved back to the group register, where it became a claim about who was scrutinizing and why. That progression looks like bad faith from outside.
An institution that cannot state its own arithmetic cannot audit its own files. Checking whether a given appointment came through the group column or the individual one requires asking a question the arrangement forbids anyone to ask out loud. So the check does not happen. Concerns reach an administrator who has no available vocabulary for evaluating them, and the safest handling is no handling. Cambridge reportedly held information about the thesis from 2023 and did nothing with it for two years, and reportedly knew about a fabricated account of a racist attack. An institution that cannot describe its own procedure has disabled its ability to inspect the results of that procedure, and it will keep discovering its errors the way this one did, from outside, at maximum cost, in the hands of people who owe it nothing.
Randall Kennedy states in For Discrimination that affirmative action is racial preference, and defends the preference on its merits. On the other side, the sayable version runs: group averages on measured traits differ, individual variation within every group dwarfs the differences between them, we therefore prohibit sorting by race in individual decisions and accept whatever distribution results. Both positions can be stated in public by a person willing to lose an argument.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…
I reckon he’s right.
Further reading. John David Skrentny’s The Ironies of Affirmative Action (Chicago, 1996) traces how the remedy rationale gave way to the diversity rationale for reasons of coalition and legal survival. Frank Dobbin’s Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton, 2009) shows personnel officers building the practice and the vocabulary at the same time. Randall Kennedy’s For Discrimination (Pantheon, 2013) is the honest defense. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor’s Mismatch (Basic, 2012) is the honest attack, and the two read together cover the empirical ground without either author pretending. Glenn Loury’s The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard, 2002) supplies the distinction between discrimination in contact and discrimination in contract. For the legal architecture, Powell’s opinion in Bakke (1978) and O’Connor’s in Grutter (2003), where the twenty-five-year line promises that the arrangement is temporary.
