Virtue, Virtù, and DEI

Machiavelli helps explain the realities of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Mark Bernstein is a lawyer who has sat on the University of Michigan Board of Regents since 2013. He’s also a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who served in the Clinton administration and was appointed to the Michigan Civil Rights Commission by Governor Jennifer Granholm. And yet, even Bernstein has acknowledged that not all is well on Ann Arbor’s Kumbaya campus of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In a comment to The New York Times, Bernstein described DEI at Michigan as “absolutely well intentioned, extremely thoughtful in its conception and design.” Then he demonstrated an incredible knack for gentle rebuke: “But it’s so virtuous that it’s escaped accountability in a lot of ways.”

For context, The Times published an investigative report on Michigan’s decade-long DEI double-down. It found not much to show in the way of success apart from the explosive growth of campus bureaucracy and the emergence of a new priestly class of consultants and administrators who have been above reproach. That is the “virtuous” enterprise Bernstein alluded to with understatement—except I think he has it wrong. “The purpose of a system is what it does,” said the British cyberneticist Stafford Beer. Or to reformulate what Bernstein said: the fact that DEI escapes accountability is a virtue of the system.