In a recent op-ed, I shared my negative experiences with an anti-white-supremacy pledge that propagated across the University of Cincinnati’s campus in the early 2020’s. I spoke out against the external forces, such as Senate Bill 1 (SB1), that are strangling DEI efforts and open discourse on Ohio campuses and called for moderate voices to lean into the DEI discussion. In their response, MK Lamkin, the author of the pledge, rightly questions what DEI moderates in higher education stand for. Their response came with an invitation to meet that served as a first step in providing an answer.

In our initial meeting, Lamkin and I shared experiences and discussed how to move forward. They outlined several instances of racism and discrimination on our campuses as well as how the lukewarm response of members of our institutions fueled the activism that led to the pledge. Racism is certainly real and still prevalent, and it’s worth calling this out explicitly. Yet, we risk reinforcing a culture where horrific instances of racism are ignored by watering down the term to apply to every unequal outcome.

Even though I disagree with the approach to Lamkin’s pledge, I left the conversation with a new outlook on their intent to address poor treatment of colleagues and students. We likely disagree in many areas, and it would be unreasonable to assume a single meeting would resolve a tension that isn’t necessarily in need of relief, but the discussion was a tiny first step in a dialogue process that I consider an important element of moderation. This realization brought me back to the core question in Lamkin’s response, “what do DEI moderates stand for?” Perhaps moderation was a poor choice of words as it can evoke images of inaction or apathy. In Letters from Birmingham Jail, King expresses his disappointment with “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…” But, when I speak of moderation as it relates to DEI in education, I simply mean embracing such a tension in the pursuit of justice without resorting to the same discriminatory tactics and ideologies that have resulted in the very injustices that we as educators seek to address.

I see several fundamental assertions as core components of moderation in DEI, each of which must be combined with action. While we must provide targeted support to meet diverse needs, we should firmly reject practices that penalize or stigmatize students based on their inherent identity. This means rejecting assertions promoted by those representing popularized academic concepts like anti-racism, such as Ibram X. Kendi’s contention that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” It means challenging those who use concepts such as whiteness in practice to cast original sin on our students and coworkers for merely having a certain skin color. Although accusations of antisemitism on campus have been used as political cudgels by the current federal administration to justify unprecedented clamp downs on campus funding, we must acknowledge the potential harmfulness of proliferating ideologies that regularly contextualize Jewish citizens as white/oppressors in a country where they experience the most religiously motivated hate crimes at a rate more than three times higher per capita than the next group on the list.

We must accept that it is possible to care about and work toward educational equity without pledging loyalty to specific ideologies or theories. At the same time, we should embrace the underlying spirit of popular theories, such as critical theory, that highlights the dangers of majoritarianism and blindness to the power dominant groups can wield over the minority. As Lamkin points out, “dominant cultural norms…can unintentionally break trust and create psychologically unsafe spaces for people in marginalized groups.” I agree that majorities can be fish who are blind to the water in which they swim, and there are oppressive consequences to this blindness. Yet, if we lean into the worst parts of ideologies that cast any opposition as inherently vile, misinformed, or racist, we promote an academic blindness that seeks its own comfort over the tension needed to co-create justice.

Moderation means mourning the loss of our identity centers, fighting to create spaces of belonging for our students, and both identifying and dismantling barriers to access and success among our various student populations. Moderation is a balance between opportunity and outcome. This means acknowledging the impact of historic barriers to higher education access imposed on women, African Americans, Jews, Irish Catholics, immigrants, and more broadly people of color. Yet, we can contend with the specters of our past without creating ghouls of our own. We can acknowledge that young men are facing a crisis of meaning and experiencing an unprecedented decline in higher ed participation in this country and let go of the idea that saying this out loud or acting to improve outcomes for this population is tipping the progress scales in some zero-sum game.

My call for moderate voices in DEI was as much a critique of myself for stepping away from the conversation as it was a broader critique of the state of DEI discourse within higher education. My hope was that by sharing my experiences and failings, I would encourage others to engage in the topics I had avoided for so long. Although the DEI landscape was not outwardly friendly to open dialogue at the time of the pledge, the landscape has changed. I support Lamkin’s call to “join in the difficult, necessary task of co-creating a more equitable future,” and truly believe this is a call for collaboration and open dialogue. Willingness to engage in dialogue–to truly hear and seek to understand varying informed perspectives–is a cornerstone of desperately needed moderation in this country.

Open, honest, and direct conversations are the point, but these conversations are at risk. Despite claims that bills like SB1 will nurture this kind of open dialogue, campus implementation has shown the opposite is true. When legislators speak of viewpoint diversity, they often mean holding space for conservative viewpoints. While these viewpoints have been excluded and ostracized at times, it is undeniable that life experiences, often shaped by our intersectional identities, inform our viewpoints. Yet, for faculty to even discuss the topic of identity now requires lawyerlike facilitation skills, comes with the danger of having classrooms targeted by members of the public, and risks that instructors are reviewed as biased by their students when completing new state-mandated course evaluation questions.

Universities will always overcorrect to reduce legal liability. Instead of preparing faculty to engage bravely and competently in difficult topics, some universities have seemingly washed their hands of this responsibility, and the path of least resistance has become to avoid controversial topics altogether and emphasize comfort over learning. This landscape is nothing short of dangerous in a world that already shields students from disconfirming evidence and varying perspectives via algorithms at a time when these young people are more likely than ever to accept violence as a justifiable response to speech they don’t like. To avoid these hard conversations is to abandon the pursuit of truth–the very mission of higher education, and we owe our students and each other more than this. In an effort to challenge illiberalism in our institutions, legislators have mandated it, and higher education is uniquely positioned to tackle this crisis even if it has historically failed to do so. Our country depends on it.