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David French

By David French

Opinion Columnist

Few things can change your perspective for the better more than being attacked from both sides of America’s culture war.

If you think the left is uniquely intolerant, how do you process right-wing censorship? Or if you think the right is uniquely prone to political violence, how do you process far-left riots? When faced with similar behavior from one side or the other, hard-core partisans retreat to specious comparisons. They comfort themselves with the idea that no matter how bad their own tribe might be, the other side is worse.

But there’s a different perspective. Remove yourself from a partisan team, and you can more clearly see that human nature is driving American conflict just as much, if not more, than ideological divisions.

I had that exact thought when I read my newsroom colleague Nicholas Confessore’s masterful and comprehensive report in The New York Times Magazine on the failure of the University of Michigan’s huge investment in diversity, equity and inclusion.

There are two troubling components to his story. The first is found in the bottom-line results of the university’s D.E.I. program. In spite of spending staggering sums of money, hiring scores of diversity administrators and promulgating countless new policies, the efforts failed. Michigan still hasn’t come close to becoming as diverse as it wants to be. Black students, for example, are stuck at around 4 to 5 percent of the undergraduate population in a state where 14 percent of the residents are Black.

The second is that those ineffective policies were promulgated and enforced in part through a campus culture that was remarkably intolerant. Confessore’s report is replete with examples of professors who faced frivolous complaints of race or gender bias, and after Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7 — when the university’s commitments to pluralism were put to their toughest test — Michigan couldn’t meet even its most basic legal obligations.

In a June news release announcing the resolution of two civil rights complaints against the university for antisemitism, the U.S. Department of Education said that it “found no evidence that the university complied with its Title VI requirements to assess whether incidents individually or cumulatively created a hostile environment for students, faculty or staff.” The school also did not “take steps reasonably calculated to end the hostile environment, remedy its effects and prevent its recurrence.”

In spite of immense expenditures intended to foster a climate of inclusion on campus,........

© The New York Times