Public Health Policy Reviews 30:
Defend Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion by reading and analyzing Classic Literature.
The anti-Israel protests at Columbia University and on many other college campuses this past Spring have sparked an intense backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across America.
Prominent politicians like Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY), international businessman Elon Musk, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and renowned Jewish-American legal scholar Alan Dershowitz are all connecting antisemitism to the national student protests of the war in Gaza.
Professor Dershowitz goes as far as to claim, “DEI is the source of antisemitism.” At the beginning of the public backlash against the student protesters in December 2023, Mr. Dershowitz penned an op-ed in the Daily Mail calling for abolishing DEI initiatives in academia.
“Fire Harvard’s Claudine Gay from my old college now – and then dismantle, discredit, and utterly destroy the Orwellian DEI group think that put her there,” wrote Dershowitz.
The all-out political, economic, and media campaigns against DEI are working.
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Photo by Manu Ros on Unsplash.
In June, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) announced that the department will no longer require diversity, inclusion, and belonging statements for faculty hiring.
Nina Zipser, FAS Dean for Faculty Affairs and Planning wrote in an email to faculty in June, “In external searches for faculty appointments, we have changed our process to request a broad statement of service instead of requiring a Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) statement.” A Harvard spokesperson also said in a public statement that the school will request “broader and more robust service statements as part of the hiring process.”
These statements can include, but are not limited to, “efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” FAS’s move is the latest indicator that elite universities, businesses, and private organizations are dismantling DEI initiatives. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ended its DEI compliance language policy in May.
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The portable writing desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Photo image courtesy of The Library of Congress.
Is there anything that US citizens can do to preserve DEI initiatives?
Comparative critiques of classic literature can educate the public about the racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia that is spreading across America. The Enlightenment influenced Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers to write The Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence in 1776. Mr. Jefferson, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and fifty-two other Delegates of the First Continental Congress signed the document.
In America, The Declaration of Independence is one of the primary signifiers of the principles of freedom and individual liberty that form the foundation of our country. Even though the Declaration of Independence is a political statement and not a novel, most English academics consider it a definitive resource of classical literature.
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The official portrait of Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. Photo image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
The creation and drafting of the Declaration of Independence by Mr. Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers highlighted Enlightenment-era ideals of pluralism and democracy.
The Declaration of Independence’s aspirational promotion of economic freedom, personal liberty, and social justice also led to drafting the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. However, the core ideas of the Declaration of Independence exceeded the aspirations and expectations of America’s Founding Fathers.
People in the modern world mistakenly assume that the hallowed words of The Declaration of Independence should apply to every person in the United States. Yet, in the eighteenth century, the meaning and intent of the declaration excluded White women, Native Americans, African Americans, and people of Mexican descent.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft – and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet A. Jacobs are at least two classic works of literature influenced by The Declaration of Independence.
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The only known formal portrait of author Harriet Jacobs, a nineteenth-century American former slave and abolitionist. Portrait courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a British writer and women’s activist who penned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a rebuttal to public ideas from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord that women should only receive “domestic training” as their collective formal education.
In the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s treatise and other writings eventually became the ideological foundation of the US women’s suffrage movement.
Similarly, Harriet A. Jacobs (1813-1897) wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl from her unique perspective as a former slave and feminist abolitionist to reveal the conflicts between the socio-economic evils of slavery and the moral values of the religion of Christianity.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a harrowing and shocking account of Ms. Jacob’s real-life experiences as an American Antebellum South-era victim of the American chattel slavery system.
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Alan Dershowitz arguing on the floor of the US Senate on behalf of former US President Donald Trump during Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate in January 2020. Photo image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
Alan Dershowitz regards himself as a legal and civil rights historian.
Thus, Professor Dershowitz knows that the people he aligns himself with within the GOP and social elitists like Mr. Musk and Mr. Kraft will first target works of literature such as those written by Wollstonecraft and Jacobs. What is also disconcerting is that Mr. Dershowitz does not care.
Congresswoman Stefanik, Elon Musk, Robert Kraft, and Alan Dershowitz are all content to bulldoze British and American traditions of academic inquiry to “destroy” multiculturalism, “own the libs,” and end “wokeness.”
Professor Dershowitz is particularly cynical, given the historical Jewish intellectual contributions to the foundations of DEI via academic studies of international antisemitism and Jewish scholarly work dedicated to the Holocaust and the US Civil Rights Movement.
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As we wrote previously in Public Health Policy Reviews, The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the American Public Health Association both categorize racism and antisemitism as public health crises.
The social exclusion, social hostility, prejudice, discrimination, harassment, and violence that accompany antisemitic beliefs and actions can trigger mental illness and long-term severe physical health issues.
Consequently, the CDC gives us adequate reasons to oppose all the scathing attacks on DEI by slanderously disingenuous public actors like Professor Dershowitz, Robert Kraft, Elon Musk, and Elise Stefanik.