These posts to the list serv are part of my mentoring approach as there is so much misinformation in the popular literature. I would usually cover in Issues and Trends. Perhaps we will revisit if we can get it on the schedule.

There are two dualling views right now  worth thinking about: diversity, inclusion and equity Vs. merit, fairness, and equality.

Special education and addressing disparities is indeed based on the idea of equity- we give something to one group (in this case, based on disability), that we don’t give another. Yet, the neurodiverse movement would have us spread that “special education” out across all students (each student gets a slice of a special education based on diversity as everyone is diverse in some way...) which many argue effectively kills the premise of equity based on disability). The other issue is the one of fairness, what is fair? And depending on how you think about them…can lead to very different places for intervention.

In the big picture…the old left position was one of class or SES (think of the labor movement, unions, 40 hour work week, child labor laws), which diverges from the new left position that of culture (often defined as race/ethnicity, but more recently expanded and generalized into other areas of identity from gender to race to neurodiversity, and then within each, there are variations…the four waves of feminism for example).

Merit, Fairness, and Equality

https://hxstem.substack.com/p/merit-fairness-and-equality

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies are now ubiquitous at universities. However, DEI is in tension with the telos of a university: the pursuit of truth through the production and dissemination of knowledge. DEI programs also violate the moral principles of treating all human beings equally and not using them as mere instruments to achieve socio-political ends. In order to protect the integrity of universities it is necessary to offer an alternative to the DEI agenda.

Diversity, Inclusion and Equity.

https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/5/4/23644810/equity-social-justice-equality-sanders-biden

[Bernie Sanders was stumped. The question, posed by Bill Maher on a recent episode of his HBO show, was, “How would you differentiate between ‘equity’ and ‘equality’? “Well, equality we talk about —” Sanders broke off. “I don’t know what the answer to that is,” he admitted]

Also:

New Left:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left

Old left:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Left

And no group speaks with one voice- you see divergence as well with Glen Lowery- who signed onto the piece about merit, fairness, and equality, was the first black economics professor at the age of 33 to gain tenure at Harvard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Loury

And

Derik Bell, who is the father of CRT, who brought the ideas of the Frankfurt School of Marxist Criticism to the legal world, which in turn was applied to feminism and intersectionality and gender identity by people like Kimberly Crenshaw.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Bell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl%C3%A9_Crenshaw

I have spent last 20 years in Germany during the summer and we always debate Marx (who was German, even though he fled to England with Engels and is buried in London). The Frankfurt school (which is no longer a school really- more of a school of thought, but a group of German socialist philosophers who fled Germany to the US as National Socialism took over during WW2, basically applies Marx’s class struggle to identity (gender, race, disability, etc.) and combines it with Freud’s psychoanalysis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

And I think have written some interesting things- the “commodification of culture” is a good one that is an interesting idea- think of how Phil Knight commoditizes black culture to sell Nike shoes using labor from China…same with music industry, or perhaps the “Keep Christ in Christmas” movement- as Christmas as a religious holiday is often commoditized and used to emphasize materialism with Santa and selling presents undercutting the meaning of the holiday. As in all things- the “devil is in the details” and especially, application.

MDB