Opinion: Ron DeSantis’ latest salvo against diversity

Editor’s note: (Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project (IARA). Erica Licht is a research project leader at IARA. The views in this comment are her own. To read more opinion at CNN.)

(CNN) In January, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans to ban the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American Studies pilot course in his state, saying the curriculum had a political agenda. The College Board has since revised the course amid a storm of controversy — and there’s strong evidence that the DeSantis administration had a direct impact on the decision to remove it. Unfortunately, the result has led to a lowering of national educational standards for this vital coursework.

Now, DeSantis is taking it a step further, announcing plans to end initiatives focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion — often grouped together under the acronym DEI — at public colleges and universities across Florida.

The move would effectively dismantle relatively recent efforts to address racial inequality in colleges in the state, many of which have been made in the wake of protests over the police killing of George Floyd.

DeSantis’ anti-DEI proposal would ban all public universities in the state from creating and funding DEI programs, and would even block the use of private, non-taxpayer funds for these purposes. The intent, he freely admits, is to drain the resources of existing diversity programs so they “wither on the vine.”

The decision to zero out DEI programs at Florida’s colleges and universities is an attack on data-driven methods that have been shown to result in better performance and retention for students of color and a more racially diverse and effective teaching faculty. But the positive effects of these programs can be felt far beyond the classroom.

Universities in Florida and elsewhere are the very laboratories that show us how to achieve fairer and more inclusive classrooms. They are workplaces that model and test these ideas for the benefit of society at large. DeSantis’ new policy harms students, administrators, educators, and parents — particularly people of color, who benefit most when the institutions they reside in begin to reflect the diversity of society.

But it also contradicts a wealth of research showing these programs are critical to the inclusive, highly functional classrooms and workplaces we should be creating in the 21st century. While Florida has become ground zero for attacks on diversity initiatives, DEI’s efforts are also under attack in other states, including Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.

And the attack on DEI comes just as companies are reaping the benefits of such initiatives. Tech giants Slack and Intel are among numerous companies that have benefited from workplace DEI programs by focusing on building a more ethnically diverse workforce and making structural changes that encourage more inclusive decision-making, hiring and contracting.

There’s no shortage of studies touting the benefits of more diverse workplaces and diverse colleges. A 2015 McKinsey study found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management are 35% more likely to achieve financial returns that are above the industry average. And a 2020 Wall Street Journal report examining the impact of diversity programs in America’s economy found that diverse and inclusive corporate cultures “give companies a competitive advantage over their peers.”

At Harvard’s Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project, we assess and disseminate the best evidence of achieving racial justice in organizational structures, policies, and practices in the public and private sectors through research, outreach, and public dialogue.

As part of this work, two years ago we created an open-source database, the Race, Research and Policy Portal, which compiles peer-reviewed research publications on diversity, racial justice, and anti-racist organizational change. The database gives us a unique opportunity to identify and highlight important academic studies, often hidden behind subscription paywalls, and helps changemakers find the tools they need.

The move to end DEI in Florida also comes at a time when such initiatives are under pressure at colleges across the country, with professionals in the field saying they often feel their work is not fully recognized and supported .

That is unfortunate. Our research tells us that when effectively structured, funded, and resourced, these programs promote civic engagement, reduce campus bias and prejudice, and increase engaged scholarship. In short, embedding the DEI effort within a university strengthens its overall educational mission.

One example is Texas A&M University, where Christine Stanley, professor of higher education and Endowed Professorship at the College of Education and Human Development, and her colleagues have highlighted the success of a long-term university plan for diversity. The research-intensive land grant school launched its DEI program in 2010.

After the DEI effort was established at Texas A&M, it saw an increase in Latinx undergraduate enrollment, an increase in overall employee job satisfaction, and more focused conversations about inclusion on campus. The initiative was effective because it embedded its goals, including restructuring attitudes and improving the overall campus student climate, into the university’s mission of academic success and institutional excellence.

In short, what educators at Texas A&M have learned is that breaking a culture of race-blind attitudes builds a more effective and resilient faculty. A more racially diverse faculty results in better faculty retention and better achievement by students of color.

Here’s another example of DEI success: In his study, Román Liera, assistant professor of higher education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University, showed how a DEI initiative at a private university enabled existing faculty to address problems Recognize hiring processes and strategically approach changes.

The private denominational university he studied, which was given a pseudonym in the published research, redesigned job descriptions and hiring templates, involved more staff and administrators in the application process, required implicit bias training for selection committees, and eventually achieved its goal of increasing the pool talented junior faculty of color.

And in another study, Decoteau J. Irby, an education professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Shannon P. Clark, a postdoctoral fellow in Northwestern University’s Department of African American Studies, showed how racial language can actually improve communication between school leadership teams.

This is just a sampling of hundreds of studies illustrating how effective DEI programs are in addressing structural and systemic biases in higher education. And they show proven results.

Meanwhile, avoiding the issue of race or using race-evasive language does not reduce racial disparities in student disciplinary actions and hinders efforts to improve schools. Research tells us that when educators are able to speak more explicitly about race and racism, they are more effective in developing school-based procedures, including disciplinary actions, resulting in greater racial parity in student outcomes.

Efforts like DeSantis’ to undermine DEI programs on campus will undo decades of progress that colleges and universities have made, including urgent efforts over the past two years to address their history of marginalizing women, people of color, LGBTQ -Tackle individuals and other marginalized communities.

It’s no coincidence that Florida’s proposed DEI restrictions come after the AP’s ban on African American studies. Both are longstanding research areas dedicated to justice for all. DeSantis, like Republican leaders in other states, may want to halt progress for political reasons, but social science and data are not on his side.