The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for McKinsey & Company Authority

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Luke Ford

Consultants at McKinsey & Company do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral and business languages that frame their claims as fidelity to the McKinsey Way, loyalty to client impact first, or responsibility for sustaining the firm’s excellence inside a hyper-competitive global consulting market. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions, practices, industry groups, partner elections, client teams, and the invisible networks of project staffing and compensation. At McKinsey, the key language is not only analytical. It is also practical and social. Being summoned. Living the One Firm principle. Putting client impact first. Delivering rigorous, fact-based excellence. These phrases do not merely describe practice. They define jurisdiction. They determine who gets to say what kind of McKinsey the firm can sustain, how demanding that culture should be, and which forms of balancing still count as faithful.
Before the analysis proceeds, the framework needs a limit acknowledged. Alliance Theory, applied without restraint, becomes a closed system. When every position gets decoded as a power move, the analysis loses precision. The consultant who stays up until 3 a.m. stress-testing a hypothesis-driven deck is not primarily executing a coalition maneuver. She is trying to maintain a form of professional life she genuinely values. The partner who structures her week around client calls and rigorous internal reviews years after making partner because she knows it protects the firm’s reputation inhabits a world whose demands are real, not merely performed. The McKinsey values, client service, integrity, excellence, professional development, are not a rhetorical structure. They are an ethical and commercial system with its own internal logic and its own genuine authority over the people who accept them. Alliance Theory names something real about how institutional authority functions inside McKinsey. It is not the whole picture.
Ernest Becker argues in The Denial of Death that human beings are unique among animals in their awareness of their own mortality, and that most of human culture, religion, and social life organizes itself to manage the terror that awareness produces. We construct hero systems, cultural frameworks that promise symbolic immortality, that tell us our lives participate in something larger and more permanent than our individual bodies. To be a faithful member of a hero system is to transcend death symbolically. To lose one’s hero system is to be thrown back against the terror it was built to contain.
McKinsey is also a hero system. It does not offer cosmic significance in the theological register, but it offers something structurally similar. To live as a serious McKinsey consultant is to participate in one of history’s most tested traditions of elite problem-solving against corporate inertia, regulatory pressure, and short-termism. Every hypothesis-driven recommendation delivered with absolute client focus, every internal session where uncomfortable truths get spoken, every honest acknowledgment that a project went against the firm’s own prior advice, every refusal to chase the latest hot ESG product: these are not merely professional obligations. They are acts of fidelity to a partnership heritage that has sustained elite consulting through conditions far worse than the current era of quarterly client demands and activist investors. That is a hero system. It promises that an individual life, lived seriously within this framework, participates in something that neither death nor the surrounding culture of short-term metrics can fully dissolve.
What makes McKinsey a distinctive case is that its summons mechanism carries an explicit existential threat built into the structure. The up-or-out policy is the most intense version of the mechanism across any of the elite institutions this series has examined. You are either hailed as a future partner or you are un-made as a McKinseyite. Every engagement review and every semi-annual performance cycle is a moment where the firm decides whether your hero system remains operative. To be told you have reached your ceiling is to have the hero system withdrawn. The threat of being un-made keeps the summons effective in a way that softer enforcement mechanisms cannot match.
Iddo Tavory’s concept of summons, developed in Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood, adds the theoretical layer that explains this. The world of McKinsey is not simply a place where consultants happen to work near one another. It is a network in which people are repeatedly called into being as true McKinseyites through institutions, interactions, schedules, performance reviews, off-sites, mentorship chains, and ordinary desk-side recognitions. The firm’s thickness is not just a matter of social ties. It is the product of repeated summons into McKinsey being. To belong here is to be hailed, continuously and from multiple directions, as a particular kind of consultant.
Through Becker’s lens, those summons are not merely social. They are the hero system doing its maintenance work. Each summons interrupts private drift, which in Becker’s terms means each summons interrupts the moment when the individual is thrown back toward unmanaged anxiety about irrelevance or career failure. The community that summons its members reliably is the community whose hero system remains operative. The community that loses that capacity leaves its members to manage existential terror through whatever substitute frameworks the broader consulting market offers.
That is why defection from the firm’s standards carries such disproportionate social weight. The consultant who stops putting client impact first, or who begins softening analytical rigor to hit utilization targets when his circle holds firm, is not merely making a lifestyle adjustment. He is, in the community’s felt logic, weakening the collective structure through which everyone present manages the terror that true excellence was built to contain. This is not cynical. It is how hero systems function. The stakes feel existential because they partly are.
Four master domains organize the struggle over institutional authority at McKinsey. The first is moral authority over what counts as serious McKinsey behavior. The second is the organizational structure of practices, industry groups, compensation committees, and partner elections. The third is the everyday network through which McKinsey distinction gets reproduced in project rooms, client off-sites, knowledge-sharing calls, and the mundane problem of navigating the consulting industry without becoming reputationally porous. The fourth is control over project flow and intellectual property access, and this is where authority cashes out. Who gets assigned to prestige strategy projects, who accesses the proprietary knowledge bases, who manages the internal distribution of expert time: these determine performance ratings and partner election. Moral language and organizational position matter because they determine access to flow. Flow determines everything else.
Running through all four domains is a persistent gap between what is said and what governs behavior. McKinsey’s public language, client impact first, integrity, One Firm knowledge sharing, is the signal layer. It maintains institutional legitimacy and the firm’s hero system status. The cue layer is staffing decisions, performance ratings, and partner election patterns. While the firm signals long-term client excellence, the cues often reward utilization rates and revenue generation. When signals and cues align, the culture feels coherent. When they diverge, people follow the cues. The firm says one thing and does another, and everyone inside knows which one actually governs behavior.
A structural fracture deepens this tension. McKinsey used to be a pure strategy shop. Now it does implementation, digital transformation, and specialized operations at enormous scale. The strategy coalition operates on a long horizon of high-level advisory and reputational density. The implementation coalition operates on the short horizon of project delivery and measurable results. Every internal conflict maps onto this break. The strategy side treats itself as the carrier of the original hero system. The implementation side argues that the firm’s future lies in doing the work rather than advising on it. Neither says plainly that it is fighting over prestige, staffing priority, and partner election influence. Each says it is protecting the true McKinsey Way.
The hardline-traditional coalition, concentrated in circles that still prize classic McKinsey strategy culture, fact-based rigor, client-first integrity, One Firm knowledge sharing, uses the language of analytical standards and separation from short-term revenue-chasing or purpose-washing. Its claim is that the firm’s value lies precisely in its capacity to sustain demanding excellence against the pressures of public scrutiny and the broader consulting market. In Becker’s terms, this coalition defends the integrity of the hero system against the accommodations that slowly evacuate it. Every softening of the summons is experienced not merely as a social adjustment but as a threat to the structure through which the community manages its existential stakes.
Against this stands a pragmatic-engagement coalition, strongest among those navigating the post-2000s reality, newer partners, and more flexible practices trying to build sustainable performance in a hyper-competitive global market. Their language is balancing, context, workability, and livable excellence. Their claim is not that the McKinsey values should be abandoned. It is that McKinsey life cannot be governed as though it were still a pure private partnership or a 1990s strategy shop. Once one side defines the firm’s purpose as sustaining maximal client-impact rigor, flexibility begins to look like drift. Once the other side defines the firm’s purpose as making McKinsey sustainable under current market and regulatory conditions, maximal rigor begins to look like burnout or status competition masquerading as principle. Neither side says it is fighting over prestige, compensation pools, promotion slots, or practice influence. Each says it is protecting the true McKinsey Way.
Each coalition has predictable failure modes. Traditionalism can harden into arrogance and nostalgia, protecting legacy strategy practices that no longer map onto what clients actually need and confusing elite self-regard with genuine judgment. Pragmatism can slide into a moral vacuum where adaptation covers commoditization, and the firm becomes indistinguishable from the implementation shops it once looked down on. The firm oscillates between these poles without resolving the tension, because both are rooted in real constraints.
Stephen Turner‘s critique of essentialism explains why the fight never resolves. There is no single stable essence of authentic McKinsey being transmitted intact. There are competing reconstructions. One faction reconstructs the firm around seriousness, reputational density, and stricter adherence to the original values. Another reconstructs it around sustainable balancing, selective adaptation, and workable performance under modern client demands. Both claim continuity. Both select from the same dense world of McKinsey values, One Firm history, and project practice to support present needs. What gets transmitted is not a stable essence but a body of material from which each coalition selects the passages and emphases that authorize its current position.
The system operates at three distinct layers. At the retail layer, the public language of values and client impact is loud and visible. Recruiting brochures, press releases, thought leadership publications. High volume, carefully managed. This is where the McKinsey Way gets performed for external audiences. At the mid-tier gatekeeping layer, engagement managers and staffing partners do the actual sorting with procedural language. A consultant is not rejected for a project because of a personal grudge. His skill set is not the right fit. Her previous feedback raises concerns. The language maintains the appearance of neutral process while doing the work of coalition enforcement. At the wholesale layer, senior partners operate with stripped-down criteria. At this level, moral language largely disappears. The barrier is the ability to generate revenue and manage complex client relationships at scale. They use the power to ignore to maintain institutional boundaries. To respond to a challenge is to admit it exists within the same jurisdiction. Silence is the stronger signal.
Credentialing functions here as it does across all the elite systems. Once you clear partner election, your views inherit the legitimacy of the firm. You can speak with less explicit moral signaling because your status stands in for it. Junior consultants must continuously perform alignment with the McKinsey Way to compensate for their lack of standing. The credential does not certify judgment. It certifies prior submission to the right protocols under sufficient pressure.
Much of McKinsey’s real operating knowledge is tacit. It lives in judgment about clients, markets, and organizational situations that cannot be fully written down or systematized. This makes the system dependent on apprenticeship and the One Firm network of internal relationships. As the firm scales and adds more specialized implementation roles, that tacit layer becomes harder to transmit. The firm relies increasingly on metrics and formal processes, utilization rates, client satisfaction scores, knowledge management systems, that only partially capture what the best practitioners actually do. The knowledge that built the franchise gets harder to pass on precisely when the pipeline most needs it.
Authority in this context is atmospheric. It lives in who gets platformed at partner off-sites, who mentors the new associate class, which practices are quietly recommended for top talent, and which ones are spoken of with hesitation. Minute variations in practice, whether a team truly pushes back on a client or tells them what they want to hear, whether recommendations are grounded in rigorous analysis or dressed-up intuition, how publicly long-term thinking is maintained, function as jurisdictional markers. They signal which authority structure a person has accepted as binding and which summons he or she is available to receive.
This internal structure now operates within a global consulting landscape that has shifted considerably. For most of the twentieth century, McKinsey stood as the gold standard of strategy consulting. That coherence has eroded under the pressures of rapid growth, the reputational damage of the opioid crisis fallout, relentless regulatory scrutiny, and the rise of boutique strategy firms and technology consultancies. These rival systems offer different hero systems: more specialized prestige, faster timelines, fewer reputational constraints. The firm’s internal debates are partly responses to talent pressure from those adjacent systems. Emerging markets, digital transformation, and sustainability consulting are projected to dominate future revenue, and the firm has committed significant resources to those areas, treating expansion as a structural imperative. This is the hero system in its institutional mode, extending its summoning capacity into new territory before competitors can consolidate.
Across all four master domains, the same pattern holds. Traditionalists claim fidelity to uncompromising adherence to the McKinsey values. Pragmatists claim fidelity to sustainable excellence under actual market conditions. Organizational leaders claim the coordinating power needed to sustain a thick network of high-performance output. None presents its position as interest-driven. All present it as what authentic McKinsey requires. That convergence of form with divergence of content is precisely what Pinsof’s framework predicts. Moral language is the medium through which coalitions compete because it is the only language that converts a bid for institutional control into a legitimate claim on collective identity.
What makes McKinsey especially revealing within the sociology of professional services is that authority here operates less through formal decree than through repeated social summons backed by an unusually explicit threat of removal. The firm works because private drift is constantly interrupted. There is always another client review, another internal knowledge call, another 360-degree feedback round, another partner election cycle, another moment in which one is hailed as a certain kind of McKinseyite or quietly signaled that the hailing may stop. Through Becker’s lens, those interruptions are the hero system defending itself against the entropy that threatens every collective framework for managing mortality. The community’s power lies in making excellence difficult to forget and difficult to privatize, because a hero system that can be privatized has already begun to fail.
The jurisdictional war at McKinsey is a struggle over who gets to define what being summoned really requires. Beneath that, it is a struggle over which version of the hero system is strong enough to keep the terror contained. The expansion of McKinsey into new geographies, digital practices, and implementation work does not dissolve that internal tension. It amplifies it, because every new office or practice that enters the serious coalition becomes a new arena in which the same question must be answered. How demanding must the summons be to remain credible? Where is the line between a culture that sustains genuine excellence and an accommodation that hollows it out? What looks like a debate about values is a fight over control of the system that decides what counts as value.

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The Moral Anxiety Of The Middle Class

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Luke Ford

The classic account comes from sociologists like Norbert Elias and later Barbara Ehrenreich, whose book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class argues that the middle class, unlike the upper class, holds its position entirely through behavior, credentials, and reputation rather than through inherited wealth or capital. This produces chronic anxiety. You can always fall. The upper class owns things. The lower class has largely made peace with its position or organizes around solidarity and survival. The middle class performs its way through life and knows it.
Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotional labor points in the same direction. Middle-class professional jobs require the continuous management of self-presentation, which bleeds into moral self-monitoring. You are always asking whether you said the right thing, aligned correctly, demonstrated the right values. This is not hypocrisy. It is structural pressure.
Pierre Bourdieu would frame it differently but reach a similar place. The middle class, or what he calls the petite bourgeoisie, is defined by its aspiration upward and its anxiety about slipping down. It compensates through cultural and moral distinction, the conspicuous display of correct values, taste, and education. Moral signaling is a form of capital accumulation for people who cannot accumulate enough financial capital to feel secure.
The lower class tends toward what Bourdieu calls a taste for necessity, a more direct and less mediated relationship with the world. Moral performance is a luxury of distance from immediate material pressure.
The upper class simply has the power to ignore. Security replaces anxiety. They judge by pedigree rather than by continuous moral performance because they do not need to prove anything to anyone below them.
My PMC essay captures this. The retail and mid-tier layers are where the anxiety lives. The wholesale layer is where it disappears.
Religion developed in the 18th and 19th Century to give people what they needed in changing and fearful times. Methodism in particular maps almost perfectly onto this anxiety structure. John Wesley founded it in the eighteenth century largely among the English working poor and emerging lower middle class, people who were neither aristocratic nor destitute but who occupied an unstable social position and needed a framework for managing that instability. The Methodist emphasis on personal discipline, continuous moral self-examination, sobriety, thrift, punctuality, and what Wesley called the pursuit of holiness addressed precisely the anxiety of people whose position depended entirely on behavior rather than birth.
Max Weber noticed the structural connection between this kind of Protestantism and capitalism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. His argument was that the anxiety produced by Calvinist predestination doctrine, where you cannot know whether you are saved, drove believers toward worldly success as a sign of election. Methodism softened the predestination theology but kept the behavioral intensity. You proved your standing through continuous moral performance.
E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class argued more critically that Methodism functioned partly as social control, redirecting working-class energy away from political organization and into individual moral improvement. The anxiety was real but the institutional response channeled it in directions that suited the emerging industrial order.
The Puritan tradition in America works similarly. Puritanism was largely a movement of the middling sorts, educated enough to read, ambitious enough to emigrate, anxious enough about salvation and social standing to build extraordinarily demanding communities of mutual moral surveillance.
When you cannot rely on inherited position or pure material survival to anchor identity, behavior and moral performance fill the gap. The denomination provides the summons mechanism, the continuous hailing of the individual as a certain kind of person, and the community provides the enforcement. The theology provides the hero system.
If religion’s core function is managing death anxiety and providing a hero system that gives individual life cosmic significance, then anything that performs that function comparably well becomes a functional substitute. The decline of institutional religion in the West tracks fairly closely with the rise of alternative frameworks that offer the same psychological goods: participation in something larger than oneself, a community of summons, moral clarity about who belongs and who does not, and a narrative that promises the individual’s life participates in a project that outlasts them.
Nationalism did this work powerfully in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So did communism, which was explicitly millenarian in structure, with its own saints, martyrs, sacred texts, heretics, and promised eschatology. Psychotherapy offered a secular version of confession and moral inventory. Environmentalism offers a narrative of sacrifice and redemption with genuinely cosmic stakes. And the PMC moral framework offers something remarkably church-like: regular confession through privilege acknowledgment, a community of mutual surveillance and summons, clear categories of sin and virtue, heresy trials for those who deviate, and the promise that faithful participation contributes to the arc of history bending toward justice.
Philip Rieff saw this coming in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, published in 1966. He argued that Western culture was shifting from a religious framework organized around communal obligation and salvation to a therapeutic framework organized around individual well-being and self-realization. He thought this was a catastrophic loss because therapeutic culture could not generate the kind of binding commitments that sustain civilization. It could manage anxiety but not inspire genuine sacrifice.
What Rieff perhaps underestimated was how the therapeutic framework would itself become moralized and collectivized. The PMC did not just adopt therapy as a private practice. It converted therapeutic language into a public moral vocabulary and built institutions around it. Harm became the organizing concept the way sin once was. The vulnerable replaced the soul as the object requiring protection. The manager replaced the priest as the necessary intermediary.
Ernest Becker’s own view was darker. He thought no secular substitute could fully do the work that religion did, because religion at its most serious confronted death directly and built its entire architecture around that confrontation. Secular hero systems tend to suppress the death awareness rather than metabolize it. They offer distraction and purpose but not genuine reckoning. This is why, in his view, secular ideologies tend toward a kind of feverish intensity that religion at its most mature does not require. When the hero system cannot acknowledge its own deepest function, it compensates through escalation.
That might explain something about the particular ferocity of contemporary PMC moral culture. It is doing religious work without religious self-awareness, which means it cannot draw on the resources religion developed over centuries for handling doubt, failure, heresy, and the limits of human moral capacity. It has the enforcement mechanisms without the theology of forgiveness. It has the summons without the capacity to acknowledge that the summons might be wrong.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Professional Managerial Class Authority

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Luke Ford

Elites within the professional managerial class (PMC) do not compete for authority by openly admitting they seek power and status. They compete by invoking moral and ethical languages that frame their claims as fidelity to social justice, loyalty to equity and inclusion, commitment to harm reduction, or responsibility for protecting the vulnerable inside flawed but improvable institutions. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions, universities, NGOs, corporations, media, government agencies, think tanks, and the invisible networks of funding, hiring, promotion, and prestige. In the PMC, the key language is not only policy-oriented. It is also practical and social. Being summoned. Doing the work. Centering marginalized voices. Showing up as an ally. These phrases do not merely describe practice. They define jurisdiction. They determine who gets to say what kind of professional-managerial life the institutions can sustain, how demanding the moral standards should be, and which forms of balancing still count as faithful.

Before the analysis proceeds, the framework needs a limit acknowledged. Alliance Theory, applied without restraint, becomes a closed system. When every position gets decoded as a power move, the analysis loses precision. The academic who spends hours crafting a DEI statement or the consultant who carefully navigates sensitivity trainings is not primarily executing a coalition maneuver. Many genuinely believe in the framework they inhabit. The contemporary PMC creed, systemic change, harm reduction, lived experience, institutional accountability, carries real internal logic and authority for those inside. Alliance Theory names something real about how institutional authority functions among the professional managerial class. It is not the whole picture.

Ernest Becker argues in The Denial of Death that human beings construct hero systems to manage existential anxiety. The PMC is such a system. It offers a vision of life as participation in the enlightened management of complex societies against backwardness, inequality, and reaction. Every diversity initiative launched, every harmful opinion deplatformed, every policy framed in the language of equity is not merely administrative. It is experienced as fidelity to a moral project that outlasts the individual. The stakes feel existential because, in part, they are. The hero system promises that a life lived seriously within this framework participates in something that neither death nor the surrounding culture of markets and populism can fully dissolve.

Iddo Tavory’s concept of summons clarifies the mechanism. The PMC is not simply a set of jobs. It is a network in which people are repeatedly called into being as legitimate actors through meetings, HR processes, conferences, social media, and performance reviews. To belong is to be continuously hailed as a certain kind of person. These summons interrupt drift. They stabilize identity against the anxiety of irrelevance or moral failure. A system that summons effectively sustains itself. A system that loses that capacity leaves its members exposed.

This is why defection carries disproportionate weight. The person who questions the prevailing framework without proper clearance is not merely disagreeing. He is violating the conditions under which others maintain their standing. In the community’s felt logic, he weakens the collective structure through which everyone present manages the terror that enlightened management was built to contain. This is not cynical. It is how hero systems function.

The crucial point is sequencing. In theory, argument determines what is true. In practice, moral clearance determines which arguments are allowed to appear as candidates for truth. The decisive moment is not the conclusion. It is the filtering of premises. Once that filter is in place, the reasoning that follows can be entirely competent while still serving a sorting function. People inside these institutions often reason well by the internal standards of the game. The distortion enters earlier. The admissible premises have already been constrained. What looks like inquiry is frequently the optimization of a system whose boundaries were socially enforced before the argument began.

Inside institutions, this filtering is rarely explicit. It appears in ordinary professional language. A proposal is not aligned with our values. A candidate raises concerns about cultural fit. A line of inquiry has harm potential. A speaker is not appropriate to platform. A paper fails to engage the relevant communities. A critique centers the wrong voices. These phrases do not refute. They gate. They determine whether content will be processed at all. The argument never happens because the premises never clear the threshold.

The PMC thrives on converting virtues into procedures. This move transfers authority from the individual practitioner to the administrative system. A professor no longer demonstrates her commitment to equity through her teaching. She demonstrates it through a filed report. A manager no longer earns trust through judgment. He earns it through documented compliance. This audit culture creates a permanent need for administrators who can read, verify, and adjudicate these reports. The moral language justifies the bureaucratic expansion. The bureaucratic expansion reinforces the moral language. Each requires the other.

The concept of harm drives this expansion with particular force. In the hard sciences, harm is physical and relatively bounded. In the professional managerial class, harm is expansive. It includes psychological discomfort, representational absence, and the failure to use current terminology. When the definition of harm expands, the jurisdiction of the manager expands with it. Every new category of harm creates new roles, new procedures, new clearance requirements, and new opportunities for enforcement. The manager becomes the essential protector. This is not incidental to the system. It is the system’s growth logic.

The PMC also prizes what Charles Taylor calls the buffered identity, the self that is detached, procedural, and universal in its self-presentation. It treats porous identities, those rooted in deep unchosen loyalties like religion or ethnicity or place, with suspicion. The demand for moral clearance is often simultaneously a demand that the individual strip away porous loyalties before entering managed institutional space. This is why the system feels thin to those outside it. It does not merely ask for compliance with rules. It asks for a specific kind of person.

Three layers of operation structure the whole arrangement.

At the retail layer, moral language is loud and visible. Social media, HR trainings, public statements. High volume, low authority. This is where slogans live. When Robin DiAngelo insists that the question is never whether racism occurred but only how it manifested, or when Ibram Kendi argues that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination, they are producing retail-layer goods: maximally portable moral language that can be deployed by mid-tier actors who need justification for sorting decisions they have already made.

At the mid-tier gatekeeping layer, the real procedural work happens. Committees, editors, hiring panels, program officers. Here moral clearance is embedded in procedural language and enforced with administrative tools. This layer cannot simply ignore. It must justify. It deploys the vocabulary of values, alignment, and harm to sort candidates and ideas while maintaining the appearance of neutral process. When Claudine Gay’s record came under scrutiny in late 2023, the mid-tier response was immediate: frame the criticism as racist, demand that observers demonstrate correct alignment before engaging with questions about scholarly work. When James Damore circulated his internal memo at Google, mid-tier actors on internal Slack channels labeled him within hours, shutting down any substantive engagement with his arguments. When Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times, she described a newsroom where Twitter functioned not as a public square but as a place of continuous shame and reputational surveillance. In each case, the demand for moral clearance came first and settled the question before any argument could be assessed.

At the wholesale layer, the mechanism changes entirely. At the real top, moral language largely disappears because it becomes unnecessary. The barrier is pedigree. You either passed through the right institutions under the right conditions or you did not. If you did not, you do not count, and there is nothing personal about it. The system simply does not register you. At this level, the language is stripped down. Not is this inclusive but who is this. Not is this harmful but is this serious. Not does this align with values but where were they trained, who vouches for them, have we seen them perform. Recognition replaces justification. Sociologist Lauren Rivera documents this in Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, showing that elite professional service firms hire overwhelmingly from a tiny set of target schools and treat cultural fit demonstrated through shared elite networks as the primary filter. Ideology is optional. Recognition is sufficient.

Middle-tier actors must engage in order to exclude. They require reasons, procedures, language. Top-tier actors can ignore. Ignoring is cheaper, cleaner, and more powerful than refutation. To respond is to admit that the critic exists within the same jurisdiction. The absence of response is itself the signal: this does not count. When Damore was fired, mid-level managers moralized loudly. At the top of Silicon Valley, the more common response to similar figures is quiet exclusion. They are not debated. They are simply not invited, not funded, not circulated. Same outcome. Different mechanism.

Credentialing is what makes this possible at scale. It functions as a form of moral laundering. Once an individual passes through the right institutions, their views inherit the legitimacy of those institutions. They can speak with less explicit moral signaling because pedigree stands in for it. Those without such credentials must continuously perform moral alignment to compensate for their lack of institutional standing. The credential does not certify competence. It certifies prior submission to the right protocols. This is what the late Susan Haack observed about Oxford philosophy and what others confirmed about the Seven Sisters: all they judge people by is pedigree, which shows that someone submitted to the right protocols. And they have the power to ignore.

Stephen Turner’s critique of essentialism explains why the internal struggle never resolves. There is no single stable essence of authentic PMC professionalism being transmitted intact. There are competing reconstructions. One faction reconstructs the class around moral fervor and explicit clearance rituals. Another reconstructs it around pure pedigree and institutional recognition. Both claim continuity. Both select from the same dense world of credentials, networks, and institutional history to support present needs. What gets transmitted is not a stable essence but a body of material from which each coalition selects the passages and emphases that authorize its current position.

Across all three layers, the same pattern holds. Mid-tier actors claim fidelity to uncompromising moral clearance. Top-tier actors claim fidelity to the austere logic of credentialed authority. None presents its position as interest-driven. All present it as what authentic professional-managerial responsibility requires. That convergence of form with divergence of content is precisely what Pinsof’s framework predicts. Moral language is the medium through which coalitions compete because it is the only language that converts a bid for institutional control into a legitimate claim on collective identity.

Much outside criticism of this system fails because it treats these institutions as primarily truth-seeking enterprises that have gone wrong. That is a genre error. They are also sorting systems. Once you recognize that dual function, behavior that looks like bad reasoning resolves into effective play. The system does not reward the best argument. It rewards the argument made by the right person in the right moral key.

The expansion of the professional managerial class is therefore not incidental. It is structural. Every new domain of life brought under managed control creates new roles, new pipelines, and new clearance requirements. The logic is one of growth without a natural ceiling. The class does not merely administer existing institutions. It seeks to convert social life into a series of managed interactions, each requiring the oversight of credentialed professionals equipped with the appropriate moral vocabulary. This is the jurisdictional win in its purest form.

What makes the system durable is that it offers a hero system that feels genuinely meaningful to those inside it. It tells the manager that her diversity audit is a blow against historical injustice. It tells the program officer that his grant decisions shape the future of knowledge. It tells the editor that her choices about what to platform protect the vulnerable from harm. The hero system turns a job into a mission. This is why criticism lands so hard. The critic is not merely questioning a policy. He is threatening the manager’s sense of participation in something larger than herself. That threat triggers the full weight of the summons mechanism: the community closes ranks, the moral vocabulary activates, and the filtering of premises begins again before any argument can take shape.

The jurisdictional war in the professional managerial class is a struggle over who gets to define what being summoned requires. Beneath that, it is a struggle over which version of the hero system is strong enough to keep the terror contained. The highest-status actors do not win arguments. They decide which arguments are visible enough to require winning. That is the wholesale version of the protection mechanism, and it has less friction than anything the retail or mid-tier layers can produce, because it requires no justification.

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Goldman Sachs Authority

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Luke Ford

Bankers at Goldman Sachs do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral and business languages that frame their claims as fidelity to the Goldman Way, loyalty to client interests first, or responsibility for sustaining the firm’s excellence inside a hyper-competitive, post-IPO financial environment. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions, divisions, promotion committees, risk committees, client teams, and the invisible networks of deal flow and compensation. At Goldman Sachs, the key language is not only financial. It is also practical and social. Being summoned. Living the 14 Principles. Putting clients first. Thinking long-term. These phrases do not merely describe practice. They define jurisdiction. They determine who gets to say what kind of Goldman Sachs the firm can sustain, how demanding that culture should be, and which forms of balancing still count as faithful.
Before the analysis proceeds, the framework needs a limit acknowledged. Alliance Theory, applied without restraint, becomes a closed system. When every position gets decoded as a power move, the analysis loses precision. The banker who stays up until 3 a.m. stress-testing a complex derivatives book is not primarily executing a coalition maneuver. He is trying to maintain a form of professional life he genuinely values. The executive who structures her week around client calls and rigorous internal reviews years after making partner because she knows it protects the firm’s reputation inhabits a world whose demands are real, not merely performed. The 14 Business Principles, client interests first, integrity, excellence, long-term thinking, are not just rhetorical structures and coalition technologies. They are also an ethical and commercial system with its own internal logic and its own genuine authority over the people who accept them. Alliance Theory names something real about how institutional authority functions inside Goldman Sachs. It is not the whole picture.
Ernest Becker argues in The Denial of Death that human beings are unique among animals in their awareness of their own mortality, and that most of human culture, religion, and social life organizes itself to manage the terror that awareness produces. We construct hero system, cultural frameworks that promise symbolic immortality, that tell us our lives participate in something larger and more permanent than our individual bodies. To be a faithful member of a hero system is to transcend death symbolically. To lose one’s hero system is to be thrown back against the terror it was built to contain.
Goldman Sachs is a hero system of unusual density. It does not offer cosmic significance in the theological register, but it offers something structurally similar. To live as a serious Goldman banker is to participate in one of history’s most tested traditions of financial mastery against market chaos, regulatory pressure, and short-termism. Every deal closed with absolute client focus, every risk committee where uncomfortable truths get spoken, every honest acknowledgment that a trade went against the firm’s own book, every refusal to chase the latest hot product: these are not merely professional obligations. They are acts of fidelity to a partnership heritage that has sustained elite finance through conditions far worse than the current era of quarterly earnings and activist shareholders. That is a hero system. It recruits from the same psychological territory Becker describes. It promises that an individual life, lived seriously within this framework, participates in something that neither death nor the surrounding culture of short-term metrics can fully dissolve.
What makes Goldman a distinctive case is that it is a high-stakes, high-feedback hero system. The feedback loop is immediate, monetary, and visible enough inside the firm to discipline behavior continuously. Philosophy enforces through soft exclusion, weak letters, slow review, missed invitations. Goldman enforces through money. Bonus pools, promotion timing, and access to deals are the firm’s disciplinary system. Deviations from the dominant coalition are rarely argued down. They are paid down.
Iddo Tavory’s concept of summons, developed in Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood, adds a second theoretical layer. The world of Goldman Sachs is not simply a place where bankers happen to work near one another. It is a network in which people are repeatedly called into being as true Goldmanites through institutions, interactions, schedules, performance reviews, off-sites, mentorship chains, and ordinary desk-side recognitions. The firm’s thickness is not just a matter of social ties. It is the product of repeated summons into Goldman being. To belong here is to be hailed, continuously and from multiple directions, as a particular kind of banker.
Through Becker’s lens, those summons are not merely social. They are the hero system doing its maintenance work. Each summons interrupts private drift, which in Becker’s terms means each summons interrupts the moment when the individual is thrown back toward unmanaged anxiety about irrelevance or career failure. The community that summons its members reliably is the community whose hero system remains operative. The community that loses its summoning power is a community whose hero system has begun to fail, and whose members are left to manage existential terror through whatever substitute frameworks the bonus-driven Street offers.
That is why defection from the firm’s standards carries such disproportionate social weight. The banker who stops putting clients first, or who begins softening risk standards to hit quarterly numbers when his circle holds firm, is not merely making a lifestyle adjustment. He is, in the community’s felt logic, weakening the collective structure through which everyone present manages the terror that true excellence was built to contain. This is not cynical. It is how hero systems function. The stakes feel existential because they partly are.
Four master domains organize the struggle over institutional authority at Goldman Sachs. The first is moral authority over what counts as serious Goldman behavior. The second is the organizational structure of divisions, risk management, compensation committees, and partnership tracks. The third is the everyday network through which Goldman distinction gets reproduced in deal rooms, trading floors, client dinners, and the mundane problem of navigating Wall Street without becoming reputationally porous. The fourth is control over deal flow and capital allocation, and this is where authority cashes out. Who gets staffed on the best IPOs, who sees the largest client mandates, who controls balance sheet risk, who allocates internal capital: these determine compensation and future standing. Moral language and organizational position matter because they determine access to flow. Flow determines everything else.
Running through all four domains is a persistent gap between what is said and what governs behavior. Goldman’s public language, client-first, integrity, long-term thinking, is the signal layer. It maintains institutional legitimacy and the firm’s hero system status. The cue layer is staffing decisions, risk tolerances, and bonus allocations. While the firm signals long-term thinking, the cues often reward quarterly performance. When signals and cues align, the culture feels coherent. When they diverge, people follow the cues. The firm says one thing and does another, and everyone inside knows which one actually governs behavior.
The hardline-traditional coalition, concentrated in circles that still prize the classic Goldman Way, client-first integrity, long-term reputation, partnership ethos, uses the language of full summons, rigorous standards, and separation from short-term profit-chasing or regulatory arbitrage. Its claim is that the firm’s value lies precisely in its capacity to sustain demanding excellence against the pressures of public markets and the broader Street. This coalition defends the integrity of the hero system against the accommodations that slowly evacuate it. Every softening of the summons is experienced not merely as a social adjustment but as a threat to the structure through which the community manages its existential stakes.
Against this stands a pragmatic-engagement coalition, strongest among those navigating the post-IPO reality, newer partners, and more flexible divisions trying to build sustainable performance in a highly regulated, hyper-competitive global market. Their language is balancing, context, workability, and livable excellence. Their claim is not that the 14 Principles should be abandoned. It is that Goldman life cannot be governed as though it were still a private partnership or a 1980s trading desk. Once one side defines the firm’s purpose as sustaining maximal client-first rigor, flexibility begins to look like drift. Once the other side defines the firm’s purpose as making Goldman sustainable under current market and regulatory conditions, maximal rigor begins to look like burnout or status competition masquerading as principle. Neither side says it is fighting over prestige, compensation pools, promotion slots, or divisional influence. Each says it is protecting the true Goldman Way.
The 1999 IPO created the structural fracture beneath this conflict. Going public introduced two competing accountability systems: the partnership ethos and shareholder capitalism. The partnership system rewards long-term reputation. The public-company system rewards quarterly performance. Every internal dispute can be mapped onto that break. The firm’s language stayed the same. The incentives shifted.
Stephen Turner’s critique of essentialism explains why the fight never resolves. There is no single stable essence of authentic Goldman Sachs being transmitted intact. There are competing reconstructions. One faction reconstructs the firm around seriousness, reputational density, and stricter adherence to the original Principles. Another reconstructs it around sustainable balancing, selective adaptation, and workable performance under public-company realities. Both claim continuity. Both select from the same dense world of the 14 Principles, partnership history, and deal practice to support present needs. What gets transmitted is not a stable essence but a body of material from which each coalition selects the passages and emphases that authorize its current position.
Each coalition also has predictable failure modes. Traditionalism can harden into nostalgia, protecting legacy practices that no longer map onto market reality and confusing reverence for the past with judgment about the present. Pragmatism can slide into short-termism, where adaptation becomes a cover for risk transfer and reputational erosion. The firm oscillates between these poles without resolving the tension, because both are rooted in real constraints.
Authority in this context is not primarily about formal title. It is atmospheric. It lives in who gets platformed at partner off-sites, who mentors the new analyst class, which desks are quietly recommended for top talent, and which ones are spoken of with hesitation. Minute variations in practice, whether a division truly eats its own losses or hedges aggressively, whether client mandates are followed to the letter or creatively interpreted, how publicly long-term thinking is maintained, function as jurisdictional markers. They signal which authority structure a person has accepted as binding and which summons he or she is available to receive. These markers do constant work before a word is spoken.
This internal structure now operates within a global financial landscape that has shifted considerably. For most of the twentieth century, Goldman stood as the gold standard of partnership banking. That coherence has eroded under the pressures of going public, the 2008 crisis, relentless regulatory scrutiny, and the rise of private equity and fintech. These rival systems offer different hero systems: higher pay, faster timelines, fewer reputational constraints. The firm’s internal debates are partly responses to talent leakage into those adjacent systems. The firm’s strategic horizon extends geographically as well as culturally. Emerging markets, digital assets, and sustainable finance are projected to dominate future revenue, and the firm has committed significant resources to those areas, treating expansion as a structural imperative rather than an optional strategy. This is the hero system in its institutional mode, extending its summoning capacity into new territory before competitors can consolidate.
Much of Goldman’s real operating knowledge is tacit. It lives in judgment about clients, markets, and risk that cannot be fully formalized. This makes the system dependent on apprenticeship and internal trust networks. As metrics and regulation expand, that tacit layer becomes harder to transmit, and the firm increasingly relies on surrogate measures, revenue per head, value-at-risk models, publication counts of a different kind, that only partially capture what matters. The knowledge that built the franchise gets harder to pass on precisely when the pipeline most needs it.
The growth data and the internal coalition struggle are not separate phenomena. They illuminate each other. The hardline-traditional coalition reads revenue resilience and reputational recovery as confirmation that classic density and client-first seriousness work, that a hero system maintained with genuine rigor will attract and retain talent and clients in ways that accommodated or short-term versions cannot. The pragmatic-engagement coalition reads the same data as evidence that workable sustainability, not maximal adherence, drives long-term participation, particularly among the younger bankers and global clients who populate the new businesses. Each coalition uses the same institutional realities to argue for its own prescription.
Across all four master domains, the same pattern holds. Traditionalists claim fidelity to uncompromising adherence to the 14 Principles. Pragmatists claim fidelity to sustainable Goldman excellence under actual market conditions. Organizational leaders claim the coordinating power needed to sustain a thick network of high-performance output. None presents its position as interest-driven. All present it as what authentic Goldman Sachs requires. That convergence of form with divergence of content is precisely what Pinsof’s framework predicts. Moral language is the medium through which coalitions compete because it is the only language that converts a bid for institutional control into a legitimate claim on collective identity.
What makes Goldman Sachs especially revealing within the sociology of finance is that authority here operates less through formal decree than through repeated social summons. The firm works because private drift is constantly interrupted. There is always another client review, another risk huddle, another 360-degree feedback round, another partnership track ritual, another moment in which one is hailed as a certain kind of Goldmanite. Those interruptions are the hero system defending itself against the entropy that threatens every collective framework for managing mortality. The community’s power lies in making excellence difficult to forget and difficult to privatize, because a hero system that can be privatized has already begun to fail.
The jurisdictional war at Goldman Sachs is a struggle over who gets to define what being summoned really requires. Beneath that, it is a struggle over which version of the hero system is strong enough to keep the terror contained. The expansion of Goldman into new markets, products, and regions does not dissolve that internal tension. It amplifies it, because every new division or geography that enters the serious coalition becomes a new arena in which the same question must be answered. How demanding must the summons be to remain credible? Where is the line between a culture that sustains true excellence and an accommodation that hollows it out? Goldman Sachs has been arguing over that line for decades. The rest of global finance argues over it too.

Stephen Turner’s convenient beliefs are operating at full deal-flow speed in Goldman Sachs’ Manhattan headquarters, the London and Hong Kong trading floors, David Solomon’s office, and the private client dinners right now. With the U.S.-Israeli campaign in its second month, Khamenei martyred, Iranian nuclear sites cratered, and Brent still twitching in the volatile $90s after its brief $110 spike, these beliefs let the CEO, senior partners, and global division heads keep the $2+ trillion balance sheet calm, reassure institutional clients, justify sky-high bonuses and advisory fees, and position Goldman as the indispensable, clear-eyed navigator of geopolitical turbulence—without ever admitting that prolonged oil volatility, Red Sea shipping chaos, or heightened China-Taiwan risk could still spike trading losses, delay M&A pipelines, or force uncomfortable write-downs.
Here are the 10 most useful ones circulating among Goldman Sachs leadership today:
Global markets have already priced in the vast majority of Iran-related risks; this is classic volatility, not a structural rupture.
Lets every morning risk dashboard stay green while clients are told to “stay the course.”
The crisis actually creates the best deal environment in years — record M&A in defense, energy, and reconstruction, plus massive trading volumes in commodities and rates.
Turns every missile headline into fresh justification for another record bonus pool.
Our unparalleled global network and proprietary data advantage give us decisive edge over smaller banks and retail investors.
Protects the premium fees charged for “Goldman intelligence” while competitors scramble.
Higher energy prices create attractive buying opportunities in exactly the sectors we have been strategically overweight: LNG, defense contractors, and Middle East infrastructure plays.
Frames the windfall as validation of the firm’s forward-looking allocations.
ESG integration has made our portfolios more resilient to geopolitical shocks, not less; the data clearly shows that well-governed companies outperform in crises.
Keeps the ESG brand intact even as some energy holdings quietly deliver outsized returns.
Goldman’s scale and liquidity-provision role make us a stabilizing force for global capital markets; panic selling by others only creates alpha for our long-term clients.
Positions the firm as the calm fiduciary everyone else secretly relies on.
Long-term investors who ignore short-term noise and stay disciplined will be richly rewarded once stability returns.
Classic mantra that keeps redemptions low and performance fees flowing.
Our deep relationships with governments, central banks, and sovereign wealth funds position us perfectly to channel post-war reconstruction capital and new energy-security deals.
Frames the conflict as future deal flow rather than risk.
The war has not invalidated sustainable finance — it has only demonstrated why pragmatic, data-driven ESG that includes energy transition is the only responsible framework.
Allows a quiet pivot toward “energy realism” without ever using the phrase “we were wrong on oil.”
Goldman Sachs remains the indispensable, responsible steward of global capital; history will show that our analysis, discipline, and long-term perspective outlasted every geopolitical storm.
The ultimate meta-belief. It lets the leadership sleep soundly (in the executive dining room or on the corporate jet) knowing that every carefully worded client letter, every ESG scorecard tweak, and every “stay invested” CNBC appearance is simply prudent stewardship in an age of disruption.
These aren’t conspiracy theories—they’re adaptive survival tools for a firm whose prestige, fee income, and partner payouts depend on never sounding panicked, partisan, or insufficiently long-term. Even as Iranian missiles keep the oil market twitchy and the regime refuses to collapse on schedule, these beliefs keep the trading desks unified, the institutional calls productive, and the brand insulated from both “greedy war profiteers” and “out-of-touch elitists” critiques. Question too many of them out loud and you risk becoming the partner or managing director labeled “out of step with Goldman’s culture.”

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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Philosophical Authority

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Luke Ford

Philosophers in the academy do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral and intellectual languages that frame their claims as fidelity to rigorous inquiry, loyalty to truth-seeking, or responsibility for sustaining philosophical seriousness inside a preposterous bureaucratic environment. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions. In philosophy, the key language is not only epistemic. It is also practical and social. Being summoned. Doing real work. Maintaining intellectual independence. Pursuing genuine inquiry rather than fashion. These phrases do not merely describe practice. They define jurisdiction. They determine who gets to say what kind of philosophy the discipline can sustain, how demanding that work should be, and which forms of balancing still count as faithful.

Before the analysis proceeds, the framework needs a limit acknowledged. Alliance Theory, applied without restraint, becomes a closed system. When every position gets decoded as a power move, the analysis loses precision. The scholar who stays up until 2 a.m. revising a manuscript for the fourth time is not primarily executing a coalition maneuver. She is trying to maintain a form of intellectual life she genuinely values. The philosopher who structures her week around close reading of primary texts and careful argument years after tenure because she knows it sharpens her judgment inhabits a world whose demands are real, not merely performed. The virtues Susan Haack lists, industry, patience, persistence, judgment, integrity, focus, realism, impartiality, independence, consideration, courage, are not just a rhetorical structure and a coalition technology. They are an ethical and epistemic system with its own internal logic and its own genuine authority over the people who accept them. Alliance Theory names something real about how institutional authority functions in academic philosophy. It is not the whole picture.

Ernest Becker argues in The Denial of Death that human beings are unique among animals in their awareness of their own mortality, and that most of human culture, religion, and social life organizes itself to manage the terror that awareness produces. We construct hero systems, cultural frameworks that promise symbolic immortality, that tell us our lives participate in something larger and more permanent than our individual bodies. To be a faithful member of a hero system is to transcend death symbolically. To lose one’s hero system is to be thrown back against the terror it was built to contain.

The academic discipline of philosophy is a hero system of unusual density. It does not offer cosmic significance in the theological register, but it offers something structurally similar. To live as a serious philosopher is to participate in one of history’s most tested traditions of truth-seeking against fashion, ideology, and intellectual laziness. Every careful argument worked through, every seminar where sloppy thinking gets called out, every honest acknowledgment of a mistake in print, every refusal to chase the latest trend: these are not merely professional obligations. They are acts of fidelity to a Socratic and pragmatist heritage that has sustained honest inquiry through conditions far worse than the current publish-or-perish regime. That is a hero system. It recruits from the same psychological territory Becker describes. It promises that an individual life, lived seriously within this framework, participates in something that neither death nor the surrounding culture of metrics and rankings can fully dissolve.

Iddo Tavory’s concept of summons, developed in Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood, adds a second theoretical layer. The world of academic philosophy is not simply a place where philosophers happen to work near one another. It is a network in which people are repeatedly called into being as serious philosophers through institutions, interactions, schedules, peer review, conferences, citations, and ordinary departmental recognitions. The discipline’s thickness is not just a matter of social ties. It is the product of repeated summons into philosophical being. To belong here is to be hailed, continuously and from multiple directions, as a particular kind of philosopher.

Through Becker’s lens, those summons are not merely social. They are the hero system doing its maintenance work. Each summons interrupts private drift, which in Becker’s terms means each summons interrupts the moment when the individual is thrown back toward unmanaged anxiety about irrelevance or intellectual failure. The community that summons its members reliably is the community whose hero system remains operative. The community that loses its summoning power is a community whose hero system has begun to fail, and whose members are left to manage existential terror through whatever substitute frameworks the metrics-driven academy offers.

That is why defection from the discipline’s standards carries such disproportionate social weight. The philosopher who stops reading carefully, or who begins softening her judgment to fit fashionable trends when her circle holds firm, is not merely making a lifestyle adjustment. He is, in the community’s felt logic, weakening the collective structure through which everyone present manages the terror that genuine inquiry was built to contain. This is not cynical. It is how hero systems function. The stakes feel existential because they partly are.

Three master domains organize the struggle over institutional authority in philosophy. The first is moral authority over what counts as serious philosophy. The second is the organizational structure of departments, journals, conferences, hiring, tenure, and graduate programs. The third is the everyday network through which philosophical distinction gets reproduced in seminars, citations, collaborations, and the mundane problem of navigating the academy without becoming intellectually porous.

The hardline-traditional coalition, concentrated in circles that still prize Haackian virtues, uses the language of full seriousness, rigorous argument, and separation from preposterous metrics or ideological dilution. Its claim is that philosophy’s value lies precisely in its capacity to sustain demanding intellectual work against the bureaucratic academy and the broader culture of productivity. In Becker’s terms, this coalition defends the integrity of the hero system against the accommodations that slowly evacuate it. Every softening of the summons is experienced not merely as a social adjustment but as a threat to the structure through which the community manages its existential stakes.

Against this stands a pragmatic-engagement coalition, strongest among those navigating the job market, junior faculty, and more flexible departments trying to build sustainable careers in a highly competitive, resource-scarce discipline. Their language is balancing, context, workability, and livable productivity. Their claim is not that rigor should be abandoned. It is that philosophical life in the modern university cannot be governed as though it were a nineteenth-century German seminar or a small liberal-arts idyll. Once one side defines the discipline’s purpose as sustaining maximal seriousness, flexibility begins to look like drift. Once the other side defines the discipline’s purpose as making philosophical work sustainable under current conditions, maximal seriousness begins to look like burnout or status competition masquerading as virtue. Neither side says it is fighting over prestige, citations, grants, hiring lines, or institutional influence. Each says it is protecting genuine philosophy.

Stephen Turner‘s critique of essentialism explains why the fight never resolves. There is no single stable essence of authentic philosophy being transmitted intact. There are competing reconstructions. One faction reconstructs the discipline around seriousness, depth, and stricter epistemic standards. Another reconstructs it around sustainable balancing, selective relevance, and workable career fidelity. Both claim continuity with the tradition. Both select from the same dense world of texts, history, and practice to support present needs. What gets transmitted is not a stable essence but a body of material from which each coalition selects the passages and emphases that authorize its current position.

Authority in this context is not primarily about formal rank. It is atmospheric. It lives in who gets platformed at conferences, who trains graduate students, which journals are quietly recommended, and which ones are spoken of with hesitation. Haack notes the etymological connection between prestige and prestidigitation, sleight of hand, and the observation cuts. Prestige works as a jurisdictional marker before a word is spoken. Minute variations in practice, whether a department emphasizes close textual analysis or interdisciplinary impact, whether hiring prioritizes genuine judgment or publication counts, how publicly independence from fashion gets maintained, signal which authority structure a person has accepted as binding and which summons he or she is available to receive.

This internal structure now operates within a global philosophical landscape that has shifted considerably. For most of the twentieth century, Anglo-American philosophy stood as a relatively coherent field. That coherence has eroded under the pressures Haack diagnoses: the rise of professional administrators who treat faculty as employees and students as customers; the ever-stronger insistence on publication, now extending to graduate students; the growing emphasis on grants even in the humanities; the obsessive concern with rankings; and the view of higher education as primarily a credential rather than an intrinsic good. Chairs competing for scarce resources want to impress deans with how research-active their faculty are. Faculty jockeying for promotions want to impress chairs with their productivity. Professors adapt by giving more priority to research than to teaching, more priority to graduate than to undergraduate students, and more energy to applying for grants and promoting their departments.

Publication shifts from communication to certification. As Haack notes, it becomes a credentialing system rather than a medium for ideas. When everyone publishes, no one’s anybody. Distinction moves instead to citation cartels where insiders validate each other and outsiders fade from sight. The philosophy job market is brutal: hundreds of PhDs awarded annually against a tiny number of tenure-track positions. The system rewards fluency in fashionable topics, good contacts, and the ability to produce blandly pseudo-technical prose that passes for sophistication far more readily than the slow, patient, independent work Haack celebrates. Reliance on surrogate measures, volume of output, grant dollars, rankings, replaces informed judgment. It is preposterous, Haack argues, echoing Jacques Barzun: judging the real work of a university by the weight of publications churned out is like the Soviet factory manager who met his quota by making heavier chandeliers, until the ceilings collapsed.

The growth data and the internal struggle are not separate phenomena. They illuminate each other. The hardline-traditional coalition reads modest departmental successes or citation longevity as confirmation that seriousness works, that a hero system maintained with genuine rigor will sustain the discipline in ways that accommodated or metric-driven versions cannot. The pragmatic-engagement coalition reads the same data as evidence that workable sustainability, not maximal virtue, drives long-term participation, especially among those who must navigate the real conditions of the modern academy. Each coalition uses the same institutional realities to argue for its own prescription.

Across all three master domains, the same pattern holds. Traditionalists claim fidelity to uncompromising intellectual standards and the full list of Haackian virtues. Pragmatists claim fidelity to sustainable philosophical life under actual academic conditions. Organizational leaders claim the coordinating power needed to sustain a thick network of research-active output. None presents its position as interest-driven. All present it as what authentic philosophy requires. That convergence of form with divergence of content is precisely what Pinsof’s framework predicts. Moral language is the medium through which coalitions compete because it is the only language that converts a bid for institutional control into a legitimate claim on collective identity.

What makes academic philosophy especially revealing within the sociology of knowledge is that authority here operates less through formal decree than through repeated social summons. The discipline works because private drift is constantly interrupted. There is always another seminar, another referee report, another citation opportunity, another job-market ritual, another moment in which one is hailed as a certain kind of philosopher. Through Becker’s lens, those interruptions are the hero system defending itself against the entropy that threatens every collective framework for managing mortality. The community’s power lies in making philosophical seriousness difficult to forget and difficult to privatize, because a hero system that can be privatized has already begun to fail.

The jurisdictional war in philosophy is a struggle over who gets to define what being summoned really requires. Beneath that, it is a struggle over which version of the hero system is strong enough to keep the terror contained. The expansion of philosophy into new subfields, interdisciplinary ventures, and global networks does not dissolve that internal tension. It amplifies it, because every new department or journal that enters the serious coalition becomes a new arena in which the same question must be answered. How demanding must the summons be to remain credible? Where is the line between a discipline that sustains genuine inquiry and an accommodation that hollows it out? Philosophy has been arguing over that line for decades. The rest of the academy is now beginning to argue over it too.

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‘Academic Ethics In A Preposterous Environment’

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Luke Ford

The late philosopher Susan Haack often discussed the cliquishness of the philosophy profession, particularly regarding her time at Oxford. Her essay “Out of Step: Academic Ethics in a Preposterous Environment” was later included in her book Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture (2008, expanded 2013).

Haack was not a sociologist mapping the network from outside. She lived inside the network and named what she saw, at professional cost. That makes her a useful witness precisely because she cannot be dismissed as someone who never submitted to the protocols. She submitted, she saw, and she dissented. The clique still ignored her, which is itself a data point.

It is not that Oxford philosophers reasoned badly in the ordinary sense. They reasoned well by the internal standards of the game. The fakeness is that the reasoning served social sorting rather than inquiry. The conclusions were predetermined by who was allowed into the conversation. The demand for moral clearance precedes the description and determines whether the description will be taken seriously. People inside the institutions feel the demand for moral clearance, deploy it, and benefit from it. Susan Haack’s observation about Oxford philosophy captures the British version, where a small clique simply decides who counts, with no particular ideological dressing required.

At the real top, the mechanism disappears because it becomes unnecessary. Nobody at that level needs to invoke moral language as a barrier. The barrier is pedigree, which is to say, demonstrated submission to the right protocols at the right institutions. You either ran the gauntlet or you did not. If you did not, you do not count, and there is nothing personal about it. They simply have the power to ignore.

This is a more austere version of the protection mechanism. It does not need ideology. It does not need virtue signaling. It runs on credentialing and the authority that credentialing confers. The moral language is what middle-level gatekeepers use when they cannot simply ignore someone. The top tier rarely has that problem.

The virtue signaling version is the retail operation. The wholesale version, and it has less friction because it requires no justification at all.

Haack described the Oxford of her student days as a place where a small, powerful group determined the boundaries of legitimate inquiry. She argued that the fragmentation of modern philosophy into these small sub-specialties or cliques leads to fake reasoning and careerism.

Haack claimed that she remains beholden to no clique or citation cartel, preferring the respect of serious thinkers over the flattery of disciples.

She writes:

[W]e have seen the rise and continuing growth of a new class of professional academic administrators, who perceive themselves as managers and faculty as employees (and sometimes, students as “customers”);
• the insistence on publication for career advancement has become ever stronger, and by now extends even to graduate students;
• even in the humanities where research doesn’t require large sums of money for equipment and such, there is ever-growing emphasis on grants and research projects;
• concern about “rankings” is growing ever more insistent;
• students (and their parents) increasingly think of higher education as an essential credential for getting a decent job, rather than as having value in itself…

A new-style dean focused on climbing the administrative ladder will almost inevitably be much preoccupied with raising money, with presenting the institution (and especially his school) in the best possible light, and with impressing his bosses with the new programs he has introduced, the new “stars” he has hired and so forth. And because he is likely to have put his own academic work on permanent hold, and to be less closely in touch with peers engaged in serious academic work of their own, he may well feel he has no option but to rely less on his own judgment of the quality of a department’s program or of a person’s mind than on surrogate measures:22 a department’s position in some ranking the worth of which he cannot judge for himself; the sheer number of a person’s publications-perhaps, if he is scrupulous, adjusted by some weighting of journals or publishers the wm1h of which, again, he cannot judge for himself; or, better yet so much simpler and more “objective”!-on how much grant money a person, or a department, brings in; or, in the case of hiring, on the prestige of candidates’ home institutions. But systematically deferring judgment like this can have disastrous consequences-especially when, as we shall see, some of the people on whose opinions the whole edifice of deferred judgment depends may have built their reputations on relatively small contributions to a short-lived “niche” literature. (Many, it seems, have forgotten, if they ever knew, the etymological connection of “prestige” with “prestidigitation;’ “sleight of hand.”)

Judging a professor or a department by volume of publications is-well, as Jacques Barzun put it, it is preposterous. “Valuing knowledge, we pre-posterize the idea, and say … everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be deemed a knowledge explosion.”23 Of course, since Barzun wrote this in 1968, the pressure to publish has become much more severe. By 1994, Gary Gutting (then editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly) could write that publishing in philosophy journals had become less a way to communicate significant ideas than a form of professional certification. And indeed, it is hard to deny that credentialing professors, and would-be professors, is now the prime function of academic publication; communicating with others in the field runs a very poor second at best. When chairs boast that their faculty are “researchactive,”
what they mean, apparently, is that they run around to a lot of conferences (generally at the university’s expense), and publish a lot of books and articles. And by this time, even graduate students-who are, with luck, just beginning to find their philosophical feet-are also expected to present and publish papers.

But as W. S. Gilbert taught us, “when everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody.”25 When everyone publishes, other ways are needed to distinguish the somebodies from the nobodies. One way is to give greater weight to publications in journals, or with publishers, deemed “prestigious.”26 Another is to look to success in the game of grants-and-research-projects. And a third is to rely on others’ judgments in the form of departmental rankings.

But reliance on these surrogate measures is a very poor substitute for the informed judgment of someone in close touch with the demands, the temptations, and the pitfalls of intellectual work. That X has published a lot, even in supposedly prestigious journals or with supposedly prestigious presses, is absolutely no guarantee of the quality of his work; to build such a record, good contacts and a good sense of what topics are fashionable, along with fluency in that blandly chewy, pseudo-technical writing style that seems increasingly de rigeur, are likely to be at least as useful as just (just!) doing genuinely good, creative, careful, illuminating work-I suspect, more so. Neither is the fact that Y is good at getting grants; to build an impressive portfolio of grant money received, a knack for writing appealing proposals and, again, good contacts, are likely to be
at least as useful as just (just!) doing genuinely good, creative, careful, illuminating work-again, I suspect, more so.

And neither, in my judgment, is the fact that a department is highly ranked any guarantee that its faculty produces genuinely fine work, or that it offers its students a genuinely fine education. At any rate, the self-styled Gommet Report that has such an influence (I am tempted to say, such a stranglehold) on the philosophy profession not only has a structural tendency to sideline the most seriously cross-disciplina1y work and to encourage departments to over-specialize, but also concems itself far too much with what supposed “star” has moved from A to B, and far too little with how adequate, how effective, how realistic how serious-the education a department offers;29 which depends, rather, on a high preponderance of people strongly imbued with those academic virtues. Something I learned in a long-ago course on comparative political systems keeps coming· to mind: under the first Soviet Five-Year Plan, which set production targets by weight, one fact my manager realized that the easiest way to meet his target was to make heavier chandeliers-as a result of which several fashionable Moscow ceilings collapsed. It is no less bizarre to judge the real work of a university-educating intelligent young people and keeping the flame of inquiry alive-by numbers of students graduated, the amount of grant money brought in, its standing in this or that ranking, or (I can’t resist) by the weight of the publications its faculty chums out.

But chairs competing for scarce resources want to impress deans with how “research-active” their faculty are; faculty jockeying for promotions and raises want to impress chairs with their “productivity.” No wonder, then, that many professors soon adapt to the reliance of deans, etc., on rankings, number of publications, amount of grant money, and so forth: by giving more priority to their research than to their teaching, and more priority to graduate than to undergraduate students, by presenting and publishing more, and by putting time and energy into applying for grants and “promoting their department.” (Probably they also spend more time on that “other stuff,” since the more administrators there are, it seems, somehow the more administrative work there is for professors, too. Funny, that.)

And many professors, consciously or not, surrender their own judgment of the quality of a department’s program or a person’s work to the same surrogate measures on which deans, etc., rely. A couple of years ago, for example, the colleague who introduced the historian from another university giving a guest lecture admiringly listed all the grants she had been awarded, but said essentially nothing about the substance of her work. (Had I been the speaker, I would’ve been ve1y cross; but either our visitor didn’t mind, or else she had one heck of a poker face.)

Inevitably, the quality of teaching suffers: more and more introductory teaching is handed over to teaching assistants and ad hoc lecturers; and more and more graduate classes (and sometimes even undergraduate classes) are designed around “what I’m working on at the moment” rather than what aspiring professors of philosophy really need to learn. Graduate students may find the idea that they are “helping professors with their important research” flattering; and undergraduates who are too naive to know they’re being fed intellectual junk food, or who are too timid to protest, or who care more about getting a degree than about learning things worth learning, won’t complain-provided they get good-enough grades.

And as the quantity of research burgeons, its quality declines. Ever more journals are flooded with ever more submissions; the peer-review system (far from perfect even in the sciences, where it originated, 30 and much less effective as a quality-control mechanism in a field of schools and cliques) comes under intolerable strain. Inevitably, the average quality of what is published tends to fall; and sifting the good stuff from the dreck gets harder and harder. “Niche publishing” is on the rise: more and more work seems to be focused on what X said about Y’s criticism of Z’s interpretation o fW’s ideas about a question,31 and less and less directly on substantive issues. It’s easier, for one thing (and perhaps some are subliminally aware that, if they spell X’s, Y’s, Z’s, and W’s names right, one of them might recommend the paper for publication-lmowing that if it is
published, this will make him better known). Anyone with enough frequent-flyer miles to upgrade to publication-by-invitation does so; and many soon realize that you can quadruple those miles in no time if you join the right clique.

Conferences seem to become more and more occasions for making contacts, for networking, and for talking yourself, or your department, up; and less and less occasions for the serious exchange of ideas. At one recent meeting, for example, I was struck by the frequency of mutually reassuring references from one speaker to others, and of shorthand phrases alluding to the very narrow seam of literature familiar to almost everyone present. Nor could I fail to notice that, though contextualism was much-discussed, David Armis-author of a pioneering 1976 article on the subject-was never mentioned. I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this; in a discipline increasingly fragmenting into small circles, it is only to be expected that insiders’ work will take center stage, and outsiders’ contributions tend to fade from sight.

By the same token, we are also witnessing a growing “parochialism of the recent. The graduate student who told me, in all seriousness, that he had been taught that nothing published before 199434 was worth reading was only naively saying aloud what seems more and more to be taken implicitly for granted. Do I really need to say how utterly bizarre the notion is that what Joe Blow and Jane Doe published in the last decade or two is more significant than all the work of Plato, Aristotle, … , Descartes, … , Kant, … , Frege, Peirce, … , etc., etc., put together? It would be different if, like some areas of the sciences, our subject were advancing so fast that earlier work really was soon out of date. To the contrary, however: at the moment it sometimes seems that attention-grabbing niche problems-or even old problems in twenty-first century dress, as with the recent
revival of the “Gettier paradoxes”-are welcomed much more warmly than work that makes lasting headway on substantial issues. And now I’m reminded of Peirce’s complaints about the literary dilettanti of his day, who have “so perverted ‘thought to the purposes of pleasure that it seems to vex them to think that the questions upon which they delight to exercise it may ever get formally settled”; so that “a positive discovery which takes a favorite subject out of the … debate is met with ill-concealed dislike.”

Graduate students are caught in the middle. They are indulged: by ”recruitment” efforts that feed their self-regard; by inflated grades and over-praise; and by the ever-commoner practice of relating to them as if they were already junior colleagues, rather than still students.36 But they are also exploited: often offered a smorgasbord of whatever their professors are working on rather than the genuinely rigorous, systematic, durable philosophical education they need; often carrying the most burdensome undergraduate teaching; sometimes acting as ·unpaid research assistants; sometimes waiting an unconscionably long time for input from faculty members preoccupied with their own agenda of presentation and- publication; sometimes obliged to do the scut work of organizing conferences for which a faculty member will take the credit; and generally faced by a conspiracy of silence and half-truths37 about how many of those who begin a PhD program ever finish, how many of those who finish ever get a real academic job, and how many of those real jobs will allow time for the important research agenda they have all been encouraged to imagine they will undertake.

It should come as no surprise that-dissipating the time and energy they should be spending exploring new ideas, building and stretching their intellectual muscles, trying and failing and learning from the failure how to do better-many graduate students become no less anxiously obsessed than their teachers with those wretched rankings, scrounge shamelessly for money to attend conferences, strain to publish, and stress over building their resumes or impressing visiting speakers who might conceivably give them a leg-up. In my experience, some thrive having already internalized distorted values; some don’t survive to complete the PhD; some are corrupted, sooner or later, in greater or lesser degree; and only a few-for whom I have nothing but admiration-somehow survive with their integrity, and even their idealism, intact. Sadly, not many of those admirable
few will be the somebodies of the next generation. Those, more likely, will be the confident products of “prestigious” departments, well-trained in survival tactics for the current climate: ambitious philosophical go-getters, capable, clever, quick, fluent, fully au fait with intellectual fashion-but blithely oblivious to the deeper demands, and rewards, of mature reflection.

The erosion of the academic virtues is gradual: at first, some succumb to the temptation to cut comers in their teaching just a bit; rush to publish the paper or the book that could be made much richer or more rigorous with a little more time; write an easy critique of a wild idea rather than struggling to identify and build on the tiny grain of truth it contains; or persuade themselves that they really have made the remarkable breakthrough they promised in their grant application, or that the most recent fad coming down the pike really is worth their and everyone else’s attention; and so on. Judgment is weakened as more and more defer to surrogate measures; integrity is weakened as more and more embroider their achievements to others and then, almost inevitably, in their own minds; focus is weakened as the “narcissism of small differences” within a clique looms large,
and the dubious shared assumptions fade from notice; realism is weakened by more and more preposterous announcements of supposedly stunning breakthroughs; independence, consideration, and courage are weakened with every small compromise to careerism. And as time passes, the erosion feeds on itself, and the pace of decline quickens.

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Where the DEI Money Goes: The Financial Structure of an Industry That Has Outlasted Its Own Vocabulary

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

The highest earners in the DEI industry are not the people delivering the workshops. They are the people who designed the system the workshops sit inside.
This distinction matters because the financial structure of the industry is also its power structure, and the power structure reveals something the moral vocabulary consistently obscures. The money concentrates at control points. The people who translate DEI into corporate risk management, embed it into hiring and promotion systems, package it into scalable consulting frameworks, and align it with executive compensation incentives earn dramatically more than the people who run the training sessions those frameworks produce. That concentration is not accidental. It is the map of where jurisdictional authority actually resides.
Start with the consulting layer, because that is where the real scale is. McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, and PwC do not market themselves as DEI firms. They market themselves as strategic advisors on organizational effectiveness, talent strategy, culture transformation, and human capital management. The DEI function has been absorbed into these broader practice areas, which means the consulting fees associated with it are embedded in engagements that are not labeled as DEI spending and therefore do not appear in any accounting of the industry’s financial footprint. Partners at these firms bill at $400 to $1,000 per hour. A major corporate culture transformation engagement runs into the millions. The firms that standardize and sell the frameworks that corporations use to manage their inclusion functions capture the highest margins in the ecosystem precisely because they sit at the point where moral claims get converted into management systems. This is the lucrative position in any jurisdictional ecosystem. You do not need to believe in the values. You need to be able to operationalize them at scale.
The Fortune 500 Chief Diversity Officer tier is the most visible layer because it appears in proxy statements and public employee salary disclosures. Base compensation at major corporations runs from $250,000 to $600,000, with total packages including equity often exceeding that at top firms. The average across the roughly 400 Fortune 500-level CDO roles is approximately $330,000. These are not activist positions. They are executive management positions that require the holder to translate political, legal, and reputational pressure into internal corporate policy. The CDO at a major financial institution is managing legal exposure, investor relations, accreditation requirements, and internal culture simultaneously. The compensation reflects the complexity of the coordination function rather than the depth of ideological commitment. This is consistent with the broader pattern. The highest-paid participants in the ecosystem are the ones doing the most sophisticated coalition management, not the ones expressing the strongest moral conviction.
The compliance and legal layer is the least visible and increasingly the most important. As the vocabulary of DEI has retreated under legal pressure, the function of managing DEI-related risk has migrated toward Chief Compliance Officers, employment law practices, and ESG advisory teams. Chief Compliance Officers at major American corporations saw total cash compensation reach an average of nearly $741,000 in 2025, a figure that reflects the degree to which DEI-related legal risk has become a central concern of corporate compliance function. Law firms advising corporations on how to restructure DEI programs to survive Supreme Court scrutiny and executive orders are billing at rates comparable to major litigation practices. The ESG consultants tying workforce composition metrics to investor reporting frameworks are embedded in the financial infrastructure of institutional investing. None of these actors describe themselves as part of the DEI industry. All of them are getting paid to manage it.
The keynote speaker and author tier is the most publicly visible and the least financially significant at the top of the earnings distribution, despite receiving the most attention in coverage of the industry. Robin DiAngelo’s reported earnings of approximately $728,000 annually from speaking engagements are real and substantial. Ibram Kendi’s speaking fees of $20,000 to $35,000 per event, combined with major book deals and the Netflix contracts, represent genuine income. But these figures are modest compared to what the consulting partners, CDOs, and compliance executives earn, and they represent a fundamentally different function in the ecosystem. The author-speaker is providing the moral vocabulary and the narrative framework that the rest of the system needs to justify its existence. The consulting partner is selling the operationalization of that vocabulary at scale. The former is upstream intellectually. The latter is upstream financially. The market has priced the operationalization at a premium over the inspiration, which is precisely what Pinsof’s framework would predict. Coalition technologies are worth more to the people who implement them institutionally than to the people who generate them rhetorically.
The software and platform layer completes the picture by showing how the infrastructure reproduces itself through technology. Qualtrics, Diligent, Entelo, Workday, and the other platforms described in earlier pieces in this series provide the measurement infrastructure that generates the continuous justification loop. Climate surveys document gaps. Gaps justify interventions. Interventions generate metrics. Metrics justify continued staffing. The software vendors capture recurring subscription revenue across the Fortune 500 for providing the measurement layer that makes the entire system legible to management. Once an institution is committed to tracking belonging indices, cognitive objectivity scores, and retention resilience factors, it has created a standing rationale for the staffing and programming that generates and responds to those metrics. The technology layer is the most durable part of the apparatus because it is the most embedded in ordinary business operations and the least auditable as a distinct DEI expenditure.
The Pinsof point that the backlash compresses the middle while protecting the top is the most important observation in the financial analysis. When the political and legal environment became hostile to explicit DEI language after 2023, the market for entry-level DEI staff and ideologically explicit roles contracted. The market for sophisticated operators who could navigate the transition, the senior HR executives who know how to embed the function under new labels, the consultants who can redesign programs to be legally defensible, the compliance officers who can manage the regulatory exposure, expanded. The backlash increased the value of exactly the people who were least ideologically committed and most operationally skilled. This is the mercenary’s moment, in the precise sense the series has used throughout. The people who had organized their careers around coalition management rather than moral conviction were positioned to benefit from the political shift that punished the fully committed.
The financial structure of the DEI ecosystem is therefore not incidental to its social function. It is the clearest available map of where jurisdictional authority actually sits. The moral vocabulary is generated and maintained by the author-speakers and the fully committed administrators. The jurisdictional authority is held by the consultants, the CDOs, the compliance officers, and the software vendors who have converted the moral vocabulary into management systems, legal frameworks, and measurement infrastructure. The former are the summons. The latter are the structure. And in any contest between the summons and the structure, Turner would tell you, the structure wins.
What the financial map shows that the moral vocabulary cannot show is that the DEI apparatus has always been more accurately described as a management system than as a social movement. Social movements do not generate $741,000 compensation packages for Chief Compliance Officers. They do not produce McKinsey practice areas billed at $1,000 per hour. They do not sustain SaaS platforms with Fortune 500 subscription revenues. The apparatus described across this series, from the university administrative class to the corporate DEI office to the training industry to the HR trade association, is a network of institutional positions, credentialing systems, consulting relationships, and measurement infrastructure that uses a moral vocabulary to justify its existence and protect its jurisdiction.
That description does not settle whether the underlying problems the apparatus addresses are real. They are real. It does not settle whether any of the interventions work. Some might. It does not settle whether the people inside the system are sincere. Most are. What it settles is what the system is actually for, at the level of its financial incentives and organizational logic. It is for the reproduction of the professional class that operates it, defended by the moral language that makes that reproduction appear to be something else.
The financial structure is the clearest statement of that truth available in the public record. It requires no inference about motives. It requires only reading the compensation data, the consulting revenues, the software subscription models, and the compliance officer pay packages in sequence.

Further Reading Per Gemini:

Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business (2019) by Pamela Newkirk describes the scale of the industry. She notes that corporations and universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars on consultants and training. Her research shows that these expenditures often result in little demographic change. She argues that the industry creates a class of diversity czars and specialized firms. These entities profit from the administrative needs of large institutions.
The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the White Male Workplace (1997) by Frederick R. Lynch tracks the rise of the consultant class. He profiles the major figures who moved multiculturalism from universities into corporate suites. Lynch explains how these consultants built a market for their services. He shows how they used professional literature and workshops to establish a new social policy. This process turned diversity into a professional requirement for managers.
Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò explains how status functions in this field. He argues that well positioned individuals steer resources toward their own interests. This capture happens when the advantaged members of a group define the political direction. They gain income and influence while the material conditions for others remain the same. Táíwò shows how institutions use symbolic gestures to maintain existing power structures.
We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (2024) by Musa al-Gharbi analyzes the social standing of professionals in this sector. He describes a new elite that uses the language of inclusion to secure its own position. This group gains status by managing the diversity requirements of modern work. Al-Gharbi argues that their professional success depends on the continued existence of the problems they claim to solve.
The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018) by Heather Mac Donald focuses on the growth of the diversity bureaucracy. She examines how universities hire many administrators to oversee identity-based programs. She argues that these roles create high incomes for people who monitor social interactions. Her work suggests that this bureaucracy expands to justify its own budget and authority.

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The Label Retreated. The Structure Remained: How Elite Corporate America Embedded Its DEI Infrastructure After the Rollback

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

When Google, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey announced rollbacks of explicit DEI commitments in 2025, the coverage treated the announcements as retreats. They were not retreats. They were vocabulary updates. The underlying system did not shrink. It became harder to see.
This is Turner’s jurisdictional claim operating at the level of corporate governance. Once a set of values is fully integrated into hiring, evaluation, promotion, and compliance systems, it no longer needs to be declared. The declaration was always the most vulnerable part. What remains after the declaration is removed is the structure, and the structure is more durable precisely because it is no longer legible as a distinct program.
The mechanism works in several overlapping layers, each designed to accomplish the same thing: maintain the functional operation of the DEI apparatus while removing the specific label that had become legally and politically radioactive.
The first layer is linguistic. DEI disappears as a term. Belonging replaces equity. Culture replaces ideology. Talent strategy replaces diversity mandate. Organizational effectiveness replaces the DEI office. These substitutions are not cosmetic. They shift the legal frame from ideology to management. A diversity initiative can be challenged under the Civil Rights Act or the executive orders targeting illegal DEI. A culture initiative is simply how the company runs itself, and how a company runs itself is a matter of business judgment that courts are reluctant to second-guess. The vocabulary update is itself a jurisdictional move. It converts a contested moral claim into an operational standard.
The second layer is structural dispersion. Central DEI offices close or shrink. The functions migrate. Hiring pipeline work moves into talent acquisition as inclusive sourcing strategy. Bias training moves into leadership development as manager effectiveness or psychological safety programming. Employee resource groups become affinity networks under engagement budgets. Diversity goals become aspirational pipeline metrics inside broader workforce planning. The dispersion serves two purposes simultaneously. It makes the system harder to audit from outside, because no single budget line captures the full footprint. And it makes the system harder to remove from inside, because the functions are now attached to legal compliance, accreditation requirements, and federal grant conditions that cannot be cut without cost. The apparatus survives by ceasing to exist as a discrete target.
The third layer is financial opacity. When Michigan’s DEI spending was documented at over $30 million annually in payroll alone, the documentation required cross-referencing salary databases with job titles and organizational charts, because the university did not publish a consolidated DEI budget. Elite corporations operate the same way at larger scale. Spending is fragmented across HR headcount, compliance functions, training contracts, external vendor relationships, and consulting fees. A shareholder activist looking for DEI spending finds almost nothing in the annual report. An internal critic looking to document the apparatus finds costs embedded in categories that cannot be removed without also removing unrelated functions they are bundled with. The opacity is structural and intentional. It is what makes the system resilient to the political conditions of 2026 in ways that the centralized, labeled apparatus of 2021 was not.
The fourth layer is regulatory reframing. The same practices that were previously justified as equity commitments are now justified as liability management. Bias training prevents discrimination claims. Diverse hiring pipelines reduce EEOC exposure. Belonging surveys document good faith effort. Speech and conduct standards manage legal risk. The shift from moral justification to legal justification is significant because it changes the audience that needs to be persuaded. You cannot easily argue against equity in the current climate without appearing hostile to a protected value. You can argue about whether a specific program actually reduces discrimination or whether the resources are well allocated. By moving the justification from moral to legal, the apparatus makes challenges harder to frame without appearing to advocate for legal non-compliance.
The fifth layer, and the one that does the most work, is the culture enforcement mechanism. This is where Pinsof’s framework is most precisely predictive, because what looks like a content-neutral management practice is actually a coalition technology that converts ideological expectations into performance criteria without naming them as such.
The mechanism is straightforward and replicable. Behavioral competencies are embedded into the annual review process. Employees are evaluated not just on output but on how they collaborate, how they support inclusion, how they demonstrate respect, and how they contribute to team culture. These categories sound neutral. They are not neutral in application, because what counts as supporting inclusion or contributing to team culture is defined by the prevailing values of the team and the organization, and in elite corporate environments those values have been shaped by the DEI apparatus that nominally no longer exists.
The 360-degree feedback system is the apparatus’s most effective enforcement tool because it distributes the enforcement function across the workforce. An employee who questions a policy is not recorded as disagreeing with a specific organizational claim. She is recorded by her peers as undermining team cohesion, creating psychological safety concerns, or demonstrating poor collaborative instincts. The peers providing the feedback are themselves incentivized to appear inclusive, because their own performance reviews contain the same behavioral competency criteria. The system crowdsources ideological enforcement while producing documentation that reads as ordinary performance management.
Dissent is translated into behavioral deficiency through a specific paper trail. The employee who expresses skepticism about the efficacy of mandatory bias training, or who raises questions about whether demographic hiring goals conflict with merit criteria, does not have her political views recorded in her personnel file. She has her communication style flagged, her emotional intelligence questioned, her collaborative behaviors rated below standard. By the time the performance improvement plan is issued, the underlying disagreement is invisible in the official record. What appears is a pattern of interpersonal difficulties and professional conduct concerns. The termination, when it comes, is documented as a performance issue. It is legally defensible as an at-will employment decision. The ideological content of the conflict is nowhere in the file.
The full exit is rarely necessary. The system is more efficient than that. Once an employee is identified as a poor culture fit, the career consequences follow automatically from the normal operation of the organization. Promotion committees favor candidates who demonstrate strong culture alignment. High-visibility projects go to people whose behavioral competency scores are clean. Mentorship and sponsorship flow toward those who perform the expected values. The flagged employee does not need to be fired. She needs only to experience a stalling career until the rational choice becomes exit. The system achieves ideological homogeneity through ordinary management incentives rather than through explicit purge, which is both more effective and significantly harder to challenge legally.
The Pinsof point is precise here. The moral vocabulary of inclusion and belonging has been converted into a jurisdictional claim that operates through the performance management infrastructure. The claim is no longer declared. It is enforced. The enforcement is experienced by the participants as normal organizational governance because the participants who designed the system and the participants who enforce it have genuinely internalized the values as professional standards rather than ideological positions. This is what Pinsof means when he says the participants believe their own coalition language. The manager who gives a low behavioral competency score to the employee who questioned the diversity training is not cynically manipulating the performance system. She is accurately recording that the employee demonstrated poor culture alignment, which is a real professional standard in the organization she works for, which was designed by people who had genuine commitments to the values that the performance system now enforces.
Turner would add that this is how all professional jurisdictions work. The claim to specialized expertise over a domain is institutionalized through credentialing, evaluation systems, and professional norms until the original justification for the claim becomes invisible inside the normal operation of the institution. The diversity statement requirement at Michigan was a jurisdictional claim that eventually became visible enough to be eliminated. The behavioral competency framework at Goldman Sachs is a jurisdictional claim that is invisible because it has been fully embedded in the ordinary machinery of performance management. The first was vulnerable because it was legible. The second is durable because it is not.
The corporate landscape of 2026 therefore does not represent a genuine retreat from the DEI apparatus. It represents its maturation. The apparatus learned from the vulnerability of the centralized, labeled, auditable model. It redistributed. It embedded. It reframed. It converted moral language into management language and moral enforcement into performance management. The result is a system that is less visible, less auditable, more legally defensible, and more effectively self-sustaining than the model it replaced.
What has receded is the declaration. What remains is the structure. And the structure, precisely because it no longer announces itself, is considerably harder to examine, challenge, or change than anything the explicit DEI era produced.

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What Did Michigan Get for $250 Million? Nine Years, $250 Million, and Flat Black Enrollment at the University of Michigan

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

In March 2025, University of Michigan President Santa Ono announced the closure of the central Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion, ending the DEI 2.0 strategic plan and redistributing student-facing services into other administrative units. The announcement came after roughly nine years and approximately $250 million spent on DEI initiatives since 2016, a payroll for DEI-related positions that had exceeded $30 million annually, more than 240 dedicated staff members operating across the institution, and department-level action plans covering every unit in the university.
Black student enrollment at Michigan had barely moved.
This is the fact the apparatus cannot absorb. Not because the data is hidden, the New York Times Magazine published a detailed account in 2024 describing the programs as a well-meaning failure and quoting students who felt the initiatives had deepened racial tension rather than reduced it, but because absorbing it would require the system to ask a question it was not built to ask. The question is not whether the people running the programs were sincere. Most of them were. The question is whether the framework connecting investment to outcome was ever as solid as the confidence placed in it suggested.
The University of Michigan built the most elaborate and well-funded DEI apparatus of any public university in the country. It did so with genuine institutional commitment, significant donor support, and the participation of administrators and faculty who believed the work was necessary and consequential. The DEI 2.0 strategic plan was not a compliance exercise. It was an ambitious attempt to transform a research university’s culture, hiring practices, student experience, and institutional identity through sustained, systematic intervention. It failed to produce the enrollment and climate outcomes it promised. Understanding why that failure was structurally predictable, rather than merely unfortunate, is what the Pinsof-Turner framework is for.
The framework the Michigan apparatus operated within rested on several premises that were treated as settled but were in fact contested. The first was that underrepresentation of Black and Latino students and faculty at Michigan reflected primarily the operation of systemic barriers that the university could identify and remove through administrative action. The second was that the administrative interventions developed within the DEI framework, climate surveys, implicit bias training, diversity statements in hiring, belonging initiatives, department action plans, were effective tools for removing those barriers. The third was that the resources devoted to the apparatus were well allocated relative to other possible interventions, such as pipeline programs, K-12 partnerships, or financial aid expansion.
None of these premises was empirically secured before the apparatus was built. The connection between administrative DEI investment and enrollment or climate outcomes had not been established in the research literature. The effectiveness of implicit bias training, the centerpiece of the apparatus’s educational intervention, was already under significant challenge by the time Michigan launched DEI 2.0, with multiple meta-analyses showing that reducing implicit bias scores does not reliably produce behavioral change. The diversity statement requirement for faculty hiring had not been validated as a predictor of either faculty diversity or student outcomes. The department action plans had no established evidence base connecting this type of required institutional planning to measurable equity gains.
These are not retrospective criticisms. The evidence against the core tools was available while the apparatus was being built and expanded. It was not incorporated into the framework because the framework was not primarily organized around evidence evaluation. It was organized around coalition maintenance, jurisdictional expansion, and the moral authority that comes from institutional commitment to a narrative of systemic urgency. Turner’s point is precise here. The DEI apparatus claimed specialized expertise over a domain, campus equity and belonging, and institutionalized that claim through offices, staff, rubrics, and reporting requirements. Challenges to the empirical basis of specific interventions were processed not as scientific questions but as jurisdictional threats. The implicit bias researcher who published null results was not primarily a colleague offering useful information. She was a figure whose work could be used against the apparatus, and it was treated accordingly.
The $250 million figure deserves attention not as an indictment but as a diagnostic. The money was real. The staff were real. The programs ran. The department action plans were filed. The climate surveys were administered. The belonging indices were tracked. The full machinery of a serious institutional commitment was in operation. And at the end of nine years, Black enrollment had not meaningfully changed. The gap between input and output at that scale, sustained over that duration, with that level of institutional commitment and that level of genuine participant sincerity, is not explicable by insufficient effort. It is explicable by a framework that was wrong about the connection between its interventions and its stated goals.
The Michigan case is the clearest available demonstration of what happens when a hero system accumulates evidence of failure. The fully committed doubled down. When the 2024 New York Times Magazine piece described the programs as a well-meaning failure, the response from the apparatus was not a serious engagement with the outcome data. It was a defense of the framework, an argument that the failure reflected insufficient commitment rather than incorrect methodology, and an assertion that the critics were motivated by hostility to equity rather than by legitimate empirical concern. This is exactly what Becker predicts. The hero system does not respond to foundational challenges by updating its priors. It responds by defending its foundations. The defense is experienced as moral seriousness. The alternative, acknowledging that the framework was wrong about something important, is experienced as the terror of irrelevance.
The mercenary response to the Michigan failure is visible in the post-closure landscape. The administrators who built their careers inside the Michigan DEI apparatus and are now positioned as experts in navigating the transition from the post-2020 model to the compliance-and-metrics economy are selling exactly the service the apparatus needs in its current form. They know how the old framework failed. They can describe the failure credibly because they were inside it. They have the networks, the institutional relationships, and the professional credibility to advise other universities on how to restructure. The failure did not end their careers. For the mercenaries it became the credential for the next phase.
The opacity of DEI spending across elite universities is worth examining in this context because it is not accidental. Universities report administrative spending at a level of aggregation that makes it impossible to identify DEI-related costs from standard financial disclosures. DEI functions are distributed across student affairs budgets, compliance offices, research programs, and faculty hiring processes, with staff classified under headings like student success, institutional climate, and access and opportunity. When political pressure forced the closure of Michigan’s central office in 2025, the underlying functions were redistributed rather than eliminated. The staff moved. The label changed. The logic persisted.
This distributional strategy is what Turner means by jurisdiction protecting itself through institutional embedding. Once the DEI function is woven into hiring processes, accreditation requirements, federal grant conditions, and student affairs operations, it becomes difficult to remove without also removing the legal and regulatory protections those functions are attached to. The visibility of the apparatus, the central office, the named vice provost, the DEI 2.0 strategic plan, was always somewhat separate from the functional reality. When the visible layer became politically costly, it was sacrificed. The underlying machinery, the hiring rubrics, the belonging surveys, the climate reporting, the compliance infrastructure, remained because it was attached to things that could not easily be cut.
Harvard’s April 2025 rebranding of its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging as the Office for Community and Campus Life, with the Chief Diversity Officer becoming the Chief Community and Campus Life Officer, is the clearest example of this vocabulary adaptation at the highest institutional prestige level. The function held. The label updated. Yale retained 208 employees in what had been its DEI apparatus after announcing the end of its flagship DEI program, with 75 receiving new titles focused on community engagement or collaborative excellence. Stanford redistributed IDEAL’s functions into school-level administrations and research programs where they are harder to track and harder to target. The system reproduced itself through personnel and embedded function rather than through institutional label.
The British class analysis point is worth making directly here. If you wanted to diagram the network, you would trace the career paths from Michigan DEI administration through the national conferences, the professional associations, the consulting firms, and the other universities where the same personnel and frameworks migrate when one institution restructures. You would note that the people who built the Michigan apparatus and the people advising on its restructuring are often the same people, or people trained by the same people, operating through the same professional networks. You would observe that the $250 million Michigan spent created a professional class with portable credentials and national network connections, and that the closure of the central office did not dissolve that class. It dispersed it. You would publish this as straightforward institutional sociology and the Chronicle of Higher Education would decline to run it.
The Michigan case raises a specific question about public accountability that the apparatus cannot engage with directly. The university is a public institution. Its spending is ultimately accountable to Michigan taxpayers and the state legislature. The $250 million invested in DEI since 2016 was not private money deployed at private discretion. It was public resource allocation made on the basis of claims about outcomes that did not materialize. The question of what Michigan got for $250 million is a legitimate public question, and the fact that it took a hostile political environment rather than an honest internal evaluation to force the closure of the central office suggests that the normal mechanisms of institutional accountability were not functioning as they should have been.
This is not primarily a political point. It would apply equally to any large public institution that spent $250 million on a program over nine years and declined to rigorously evaluate whether the program was achieving its stated goals. The DEI apparatus at Michigan had extensive measurement infrastructure. It produced dashboards, climate surveys, belonging indices, and annual reports. What it did not produce was an honest assessment of whether any of this was working, because producing that assessment would have required the apparatus to examine its own foundations, and the apparatus was not organized to do that. It was organized to sustain the coalition, maintain the jurisdiction, and perform the institutional commitment to equity that donors, accreditors, and the campus community expected.
The closure was forced from outside because it could not have been generated from inside. That is the structural trap stated as plainly as the evidence allows.
What remains after the closure is not nothing. The underlying problems Michigan’s apparatus was built to address are real. The historical exclusion of Black students from Michigan, the documented gap between the university’s demographics and the state’s demographics, the campus climate experiences that minority students report, all of these are real and matter. The failure of a specific set of administrative interventions to solve these problems does not mean the problems do not exist or that no interventions can work. What it means is that the apparatus substituted the performance of institutional commitment for the harder work of identifying what actually moves the needle, and that the performance was expensive, durable, and self-reinforcing in ways that made honest evaluation structurally difficult.
Dobbin and Kalev’s research on what actually works in organizational diversity is relevant here. The interventions with the best evidence base, mentoring programs with clear accountability, voluntary diversity task forces with real authority, targeted recruitment at high-yield pipeline institutions, structured hiring processes with specific outcome tracking, are largely not the centerpiece of elaborate DEI administrative architectures. They are less visible, less credential-generating, and less suited to supporting large professional staffs. The apparatus gravitated toward the interventions that sustained it rather than toward the interventions with the strongest evidence, and the $250 million Michigan spent represents in part the cost of that gravitational pull.
Becker would say this is how all hero systems work. They sustain themselves through the production of meaning rather than through the production of outcomes, and they experience the demand that they demonstrate outcomes as an attack on their foundations rather than as a reasonable request. The University of Michigan DEI apparatus told its members that they stood at the hinge of history, that the work was necessary and serious, that the resistance they faced was evidence of the system they were fighting. When the enrollment data came back flat after nine years and a quarter billion dollars, the apparatus did not revise its theory of change. It defended its foundations.
The closure of the central office in March 2025 was not the end of the Michigan DEI story. The functions persisted in different administrative homes. The professional class built by the apparatus dispersed into the national network. The framework was rebranded rather than revised. The question of what the money bought remained unanswered.
That question is sitting in the public record. It has not been asked by the people best positioned to answer it. It is, in the precise Beckerian sense, the most important question in the room and the one least likely to be asked there.

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The UC California Diversity Industry

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

In 1996 California voters passed Proposition 209, amending the state constitution to prohibit public institutions from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to individuals based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, education, and contracting. The University of California became the largest public university system in the country operating under an explicit constitutional ban on race-conscious admissions and hiring preferences.
It also became the public institution with one of the most elaborate DEI administrative infrastructures in the country.
The UC system currently employs hundreds of administrators in roles dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion across its ten campuses, with the overall apparatus consuming hundreds of millions of dollars annually in salaries, programs, office budgets, and consulting contracts. It requires diversity statements from faculty job applicants and uses rubrics to score them as part of the hiring process. It runs mandatory training programs, produces systemwide equity reports, and maintains an Office of the President DEI infrastructure that coordinates activity across campuses. It has, in short, built the administrative architecture of an aggressive DEI operation while operating under a constitutional provision that prohibits the core policy instrument such operations were designed to implement.
This is not a contradiction the apparatus acknowledges. It is a structural feature the apparatus has learned to navigate, and the navigation is worth examining because it demonstrates more clearly than any other case how coalition technologies work when they face serious legal constraint.
The diversity statement requirement is the cleanest example. Faculty candidates at UC campuses are asked to submit statements describing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion. These statements are scored using rubrics that award points for demonstrated commitment to equity work, experience with underrepresented populations, and articulation of how the candidate’s research or teaching advances inclusion goals. Candidates who score below a threshold on the diversity statement are eliminated before their research or teaching materials are reviewed.
The UC system’s position is that this process does not violate Proposition 209 because it evaluates commitment to diversity as a professional qualification rather than using race as a selection criterion. The distinction is legally important and substantively thin. The diversity statement rubric functions as a proxy screen. Candidates who have spent careers working with underrepresented communities, who frame their research in terms of equity and inclusion, and who can demonstrate a track record of DEI-related activity score higher than candidates who cannot. The demographic correlation between high diversity statement scores and candidate characteristics that would be impermissible to consider directly is not accidental. It is the mechanism.
This is Turner’s jurisdictional claim made concrete. The DEI apparatus converted a constitutional prohibition into a design problem. The solution was to replace the prohibited criterion with a professional qualification that does the same jurisdictional work while remaining formally compliant with the law. The authority to define what counts as a serious professional qualification, which the apparatus controls, is the authority to define who enters the faculty. Proposition 209 prohibited the use of race. It did not prohibit the use of demonstrated commitment to racial equity as a hiring criterion, and the apparatus wrote the rubric.
The Faculty Association of the University of California and external critics including legal scholars and civil rights organizations have challenged diversity statement requirements as a violation of Proposition 209’s intent if not its letter. The UC system’s defense has consistently been that commitment to diversity is a legitimate academic value rather than a racial preference. That defense is formally coherent. It also illustrates precisely the point Pinsof’s framework makes about how moral language functions as a coalition technology. The language of professional values converts a policy that would be legally vulnerable if stated directly into a standard that is difficult to challenge because challenging it requires arguing against diversity as a value rather than against the specific mechanism through which that value is operationalized.
The asymmetry is instructive. A faculty candidate who wrote a diversity statement arguing that race-blind meritocracy is the appropriate standard for faculty hiring would score poorly on the UC diversity statement rubric and might be eliminated before her research record was reviewed. A candidate who wrote an extended statement describing her commitment to equity-centered pedagogy, her experience working with underrepresented students, and her plans to contribute to campus belonging initiatives would score well. The rubric does not ask about race. It asks about equity commitment. The two are not identical. They produce strongly correlated outcomes.
The legal exposure this creates is one reason the apparatus has become increasingly sophisticated in its vocabulary management. The post-2023 rebranding of some UC DEI language away from explicit racial equity framing toward belonging, inclusive excellence, and student success is not a retreat from the underlying policy agenda. It is the same vocabulary adaptation Turner predicts when jurisdictional claims face legal pressure. The function holds. The language updates. The diversity statement rubric continues to operate as the primary screening mechanism for faculty hiring at most UC campuses.
The Becker dimension of the UC case is specific to the public university context. The fully committed participants in the UC DEI apparatus are not simply defending an administrative domain. They are defending the university’s claim to be doing something historically significant in a state that voted to prohibit what they believe is necessary work. This adds a layer of moral intensity to the normal hero system dynamics. The apparatus is not just managing mortality terror through institutional belonging. It is managing the terror of being on the wrong side of a constitutional decision that large numbers of California voters made deliberately. The summons is sharpened by the opposition. Every Proposition 209 compliance audit, every lawsuit from colorblind advocacy organizations, every conservative regent or legislative critic becomes evidence that the work is necessary and that the apparatus is right to maintain it under pressure.
This is exactly the boundary-sharpening function Becker identifies. The hero system needs an outside against which it defines itself. The UC DEI apparatus has a particularly vivid outside in the form of a constitutional provision backed by electoral majority. The fully committed experience their continued operation under that constraint not as an ethical problem but as a moral achievement. They are doing necessary work that the voters tried to prohibit and finding ways to do it anyway. That experience of principled resistance is itself a source of meaning that reinforces the summons and raises the cost of questioning the framework.
The mercenary variant in the UC context takes a specific form. The administrator who builds her career navigating Proposition 209 constraints, who becomes known as the expert who knows how to run a high-functioning DEI operation within the legal framework, who consults for other public universities facing similar constraints, is selling exactly the service the apparatus needs. Her value is not ideological commitment. It is operational expertise in how to maintain the jurisdictional function when the most direct path to it is legally closed. She is the person who wrote the diversity statement rubric, who trained the committees to score it consistently, who developed the training programs that teach faculty to understand equity commitment as a professional qualification. She is the apparatus’s most useful participant because she makes the technology work.
The conflicted insider in the UC context is the faculty member who privately believes the diversity statement requirement is legally indefensible but who serves on hiring committees and scores the rubric because refusing would mark her as hostile to the apparatus and cost her the collegial relationships, grant letter support, and committee assignments she needs to function professionally. She is neither the true believer nor the mercenary. She is the cultural participant with enough professional conscience to feel the strain but not enough institutional independence to act on it. Her compliance is not enthusiasm. It is the path of least resistance inside a system that has made dissent costly.
The question the UC apparatus cannot answer is the same one the broader network cannot answer, but it has a specifically Californian form. Proposition 209 passed in 1996 with 54 percent of the vote. It was reaffirmed in 2020 when Proposition 16, which would have repealed it, failed with 57 percent voting to keep the ban. California voters have twice, a generation apart, decided by majority that race-conscious preferences in public institutions should be prohibited. The DEI apparatus that has grown up inside that constraint has done so by finding legal workarounds that maintain the function while formally complying with the rule. The question is whether this represents a principled professional judgment that the voters’ decision was wrong and that the public university has an obligation to advance racial equity despite the constitutional prohibition, or whether it represents an administrative class using coalition technologies to maintain its jurisdiction against a democratic decision it did not like.
Both characterizations contain truth and neither is the whole story. The underlying problems the apparatus was built to address, the historical exclusion of Black and Latino students and faculty from the University of California, the documented gap between California’s demographic composition and its university faculty, are real. The voters’ decision to prohibit race-conscious remedies did not make those problems disappear. The apparatus’s judgment that something needs to be done is not simply self-interested.
But the Pinsof-Turner analysis does not require the problem to be imaginary to apply. It requires only that the apparatus’s response to the problem has generated a coalition with material interests in its own perpetuation, that the moral vocabulary justifying the apparatus also does the work of protecting the jurisdiction, and that the democratic decision to limit that jurisdiction has been routed around through mechanisms that maintain the function under different labels. All three of those things are true and publicly documented.
The diversity statement requirement is scheduled to be reviewed under pressure from multiple directions in 2026. The outcome of that review will reveal which coalition controls the narrative at the UC Office of the President and how far the apparatus is willing to go in formally acknowledging the gap between its stated methodology and its functional operation. The fully committed will defend the rubric as a professional standard. The mercenaries will propose a vocabulary update that preserves the screening function. The cultural participants will score whatever rubric they are given. The conflicted insiders will continue feeling the strain in silence.
The voters made their decision twice. The apparatus made its decision about that decision. The sociology of how institutions navigate democratic constraints they disagree with is not a comfortable subject inside the institutions doing the navigating. It is, however, exactly the subject the Pinsof-Turner framework was built to illuminate.

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