Diversity as 'Conditional'

 Trump has floated creating “a ring around the U.S. economy” by imposing a blanket 10 percent tariff on all imports to the U.S. This would directly raise the prices of trillions of dollars of imports, eroding the purchasing power of consumers’ wages and incomes. It would raise the prices of intermediate goods for U.S.-based firms, which would lead to further price increases for American consumers. And it would lead to retaliatory tariffs from other nations, causing further price hikes.--Strain

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On the website of the American Sociological Association describing its 2024 annual meeting, we have the official "theme" of the meeting:

"..sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles."

"To intervene." "Political struggles." Your idea of academic study?

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Diversity as 'Conditional'

Harvard history professor James Hankins, writing at Law & Liberty, offers a diversity statement to Harvard:

"Since, however, you require me, as a condition of further employment, to state my attitude to these “values” that the university is said to share (though I don’t remember a faculty vote endorsing them), let me say that, in general, the statement of EDIB beliefs offered on your website is too vapid to offer any purchase for serious ethical analysis. The university, according to you, espouses an absolute commitment to a set of words that seems to generate positive feelings in your office, and perhaps among administrators generally, but it is not my practice to make judgments based on feelings. In fact, my training as a historian leads me to distrust such feelings as a potential obstacle to clear thinking. I don’t think it’s useful to describe the feelings I experience when particular words and slogans are invoked and how they affect my professional motivations. It might be useful on a psychoanalyst’s couch or in a religious cult, but not in a university.

Let me take, as an example, the popular DEI slogan “Diversity is our strength.” This states as an absolute truth a belief that, at best, can only be conditional. When George Washington decided not to require, as part of the military oath of the Continental Army, a disavowal of transubstantiation (as had been previous practice), he was able to enlist Catholic soldiers from Maryland to fight the British. Diversity was our strength. On the other hand, when the combined forces of Islam, under the command of Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik, besieged Constantinople in 717, diversity was not their strength. At the crisis of the siege, the Christian sailors rowing in the Muslim navy rose in revolt and the amphibious assault broke down."

Simple scrutiny can be withering when applied to philosophical pablum and bumper sticker slogans. That probably explains why scrutiny is so discouraged.