Thursday, September 12, 2024

Part I

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Will Big Business Break with Woke? Big Companies Stop Reporting to LGBTQ Groups for Ratings, Pull Back from DEI Programs

There’s been a good deal of attention, especially in the business world, to supposed pullbacks from DEI initiatives on the part of major American corporations. This is a huge story, lots of worldview implications. DEI means diversity, equity, and inclusion. And DEI programs, DEI offices have been leaning into identity politics and frankly, a very leftist agenda separating people according to identity, ethnicity, all kinds of criteria, and basically putting into place programs that in so many cases really aren’t about doing the right thing so much as overthrowing an established moral order. I mean it exactly that way. And so it comes down to LGBTQ issues that’s at the top of the list in terms of the activism.

People claiming you need to have representation, and this means inclusion. In order to meet the standard for inclusion, you need to change these policies in such a way. Well, you can pretty much figure out where this goes. In major American corporations, and this has been a problem for decades now, getting more intense all the time. In major American corporations, you have many Christians in the executive or say the sub-executive ranks and they’re being told that, “If you don’t have the right beliefs and you’re not willing to just absolutely affirm the inclusion policies pro-LGBTQ,” and by that I mean extremely pro-LGBTQ, and all the rest, “then you don’t have a future in this company.”

And furthermore, there have been external rating agencies. This has been very important. A lot of this has come from academia in terms of the pressure and activist groups, and yet some of it has also been coming, major, major energy has been coming from groups such as the Human Rights Campaign. That is a pro-LGBTQ movement that has been leveraging influence in business. They basically control so much of higher education, but in the business world, they’ve been bringing all kinds of pressure and frankly, major American corporations have just been caving.

But something has been happening and there has been a pushback. We’re going to talk about the pushback, then we’re going to talk about why the pushback came and why it matters. But first of all, what does the pushback look like? Well, let’s take a front-page article from last Friday’s Wall Street Journal. So remember, if you’re talking about big business, there’s no place to talk about it than looking at the reporting in the Wall Street Journal. And in the Wall Street Journal, there is no more important real estate than the front page.

Here’s the headline, “Big brands pull back from LGBTQ Index.” Reporters Theo Francis and Lauren Weber report “When Ford scaled back its diversity initiatives, it called out one organization by name, the Human Rights Campaign.” I continue, “The automaker told employees last week it would stop providing workplace data to the gay rights lobbying group, which spent decades persuading big companies to embrace policies hospitable to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees and customers.”

And this article makes clear that it’s front page significance here, not just because it’s Ford that probably would rank as a front page story by itself, but because this is indicative of other companies as well. The paper tells us, “Other companies dialing down diversity initiatives this summer also said they would distance themselves from the Human Rights Campaign, Harley Davidson, Lowe’s, rural retailer, Tractor Supply, and distiller, Brown-Forman, which makes Jack Daniels.”

Now, I think that’s a little bit funny, I’ll just mention, that you mention a product brand in order to understand what the company is. Even on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. There you go. It’s also interesting that the Brewer, Molson Coors joined this list just last week. The Wall Street Journal says, “The companies didn’t elaborate on why they highlighted HRC in their announcements. Nearly all of them had ranked well on an index the Human Rights Campaign uses to score companies by their LGBTQ friendly policies. Some of the companies said they would stop sharing data with HRC after they’ve been targeted by social media activist, Robby Starbuck.”

All right. This really is big headline news. This deserves attention on the front page and honestly deserves our attention. Now, there have been many efforts just undertaken in the last several years to try to push back against the DEI initiatives in general and the ideology behind them, but also to push back, particularly when this comes down to LGBTQ plus issues. And the fact that many companies have become the absolute cheerleaders for the moral revolution represented with those letters.

But it’s also really clear, and I want to get to the bottom line here, it’s really clear that these companies aren’t necessarily making a calculated corporate decision here. That is to say they’re not just stepping back and saying, “Just all things being equal, was this a good idea?” No. As the journal indicates, pressure has been brought on them. Now, here’s where we understand how big cultural change works.

I think this turns out to be really important. So the reason why these DEI initiatives got so far in big corporate America is because those who are trying to bring about the pro-LGBTQ activism understood that corporate America is one of those giant parts of the machine that must be captured if you want to capture the culture. Because big corporate America is not only about big corporate America, it’s also about the rest of corporate America that wants to be big corporate America.

You want to do business with Ford? You’ve got to also demonstrate your bonafides in terms of commitment to the very same issues. And Ford wants to report to the HRC that it has set these policies in place and it’s giving preference to businesses that set these priorities in place. That’s one of the ways the sexual revolution, the gender revolution, the LGBTQ revolution has been pressed through the entire culture.

Okay. So if there’s pushback now, as I say, there’s no reason to think that these companies just on their own came to this conclusion. Indeed, the last part I just read from the article indicates that it was a shareholder activist who brought pressure and organized a lot of this pressure against these companies to step back from the DEI initiatives in general and from the listings that places such as the Human Rights Campaign in particular.

But it can’t just come from some shareholder activist. There has to be a groundswell of pressure. And I think that’s exactly what’s happening. Now with companies like Lowe’s and say, John Deere and Tractor Supply, the amazing thing in one sense is that they ever bought into this ridiculousness. And that’s because you would think that corporate America would care more about selling stuff to customers, for example, then impressing an LGBTQ activist group.

But here’s where things get very interesting, and I’m going far beyond the Wall Street Journal’s concern because I want to speak to Christians about understanding why all this matters. It comes down to the fact that when you look at these corporations, you have a corporate elite in the management. You have big-time shareholders sometimes as investors, and they have influence. You also have external forces that are bringing this kind of pressure, and that includes pressure on the board members, the corporate board members of these big corporations.

The Tractor Supply change in the right direction, by the way, after taking the wrong direction on this issue came by action of its corporate board, and it came after there was just a lot of pressure and awful lot of pushback coming from the rather conservative customer base of Tractor Supply. John Deere pretty much in the same situation. Lowe’s, home construction, home improvement materials, let’s just say that’s not an overwhelmingly liberal customer base.

I think you can figure that out. But when it comes to this particular news item about the HRC and these companies pulling back and remember, these are big, big, big, big names, when it comes to Ford, Ford is a huge multinational global corporation. It’s really hard to bring a lot of direct pressure as a conservative evangelical Christians against a company like Ford.

It’s hard to put a significant documentable dent, so to speak, in their say, vehicle sales or something like that. And that means something else is at work as well. I’m not saying that has no effect. I’m saying something else is at work as well. And here’s where you have to look at something really interesting happening in the culture. So these activist groups, and we’ll take Human Rights Campaign as an example, these activist groups bring pressure against these corporations and they benchmark it because remember, they’re issuing a score every year. And these companies been very concerned about having a good score.

But the fact is that these groups come back demanding more and more, and more, and more. And I’m just going to argue because it becomes abundantly clear, this is true, these companies are running out of more to give. So at one point they were demanding you need to treat same-sex couples the same as married heterosexual couples in terms of benefits. Okay? They did that. And they said, “Well, then you have to do this. We need this percentage of people in the executive management team.” Well, they did that. “And then you need this percentage in terms of where you’re spending corporate advertising and where you’re going to recruit new employees on campuses, and you need to set this kind of quota system in place.”

And many of these companies effectively did. Legally, they redefined quota as say aspirational employment goals. But at some point there’s a diminishing return to this. And so even as, I think, there is something big afoot here, and I think this is good news. I think it’s a turning point in the culture. I didn’t say a U-turn, but it is a turning point in the culture when these big corporations are simply telling HRC, “Go take a hike.” That is a dramatic development. Frankly, it’s even more dramatic than this news story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal would indicate.

But then I also said, we need to address what does this mean? And this means that we’re in a society that is still trying to figure out a lot of these issues. And even as for example, in issues like same-sex marriage, and an awful lot of what the LGBTQ movement has been demanding, even as much of the culture is just capitulated, absolute surrender, it’s also interesting to note that there are at least some breaks, if not some firewalls, in how successful that strategy is going to be.

So I’m also going to say, and we’re going to be tracking this as we look to the future, that when you say LGBTQ, interestingly enough, the big problem for the advance right now, these activist organizations, it isn’t L, it isn’t B, it isn’t G, it isn’t even Q, it is T. Because when you take the transgender revolution, let’s just say, and Genesis explains why this would be so, it is much harder to pull that off than all the rest. And in one sense, I think that really does play into this equation.

Part II

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Where Are the Conservatives on Campus? Higher Education Has Been Largely Evacuated of Conservatives

But today, while we have the opportunity, I also want to talk about another of the biggest issues confronting Christians in this age. And you say, “Well, what could be on the scale of that issue related to the front page article in the Wall Street Journal? Well, I’ll tell you, it is a major discussion going on in higher education about why there are so few conservatives on the campus, especially in elite powerful higher education.

And the most recent salvo in terms of this debate has been delivered by Steven M. Teles. He’s a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He holds other positions as well. So right here in the most influential periodical in higher education is a huge thought piece entitled, “Why are there so few conservative professors?” The subhead in the article, “The facts are beyond dispute. The causes and solutions are not.” Steven M. Teles writes, “More conspicuously than at any time in living memory, elite higher education has found itself in the political crosshairs.”

But then he goes on to say there are just so few conservatives. And he writes that, “The public’s impression that American higher education has grown increasingly closed-minded is undeniably correct. Indeed, concerns about the ideological drift of the university are no longer limited to conservatives, but now include some left-leaning faculty who worry that higher education has become in the words of Gregory Conti, a political philosopher at Princeton ‘sectarian.’”

Now that means sectarian on the left. That means so, so far on the left that even some liberals are now concerned about the problem. And when we talk about declining presence and influence of conservative professors in elite American higher education, you need to recognize we’re not talking about an imbalance, we’re talking about an evacuation, and we’re talking about an intellectual climate that is just inhospitable to conservatives of virtually any stripe.

Teles writes, “This mounting sectarianism manifests itself in various aspects of the university including the scope of debate within and outside the classroom, the growth of campus administration and the tenor of student life.” He says, “For a professor like myself, the character of the professoriate,” that means the professorship is the most salient aspect of the change. And where conservative faculty are concerned, the facts are beyond dispute. Their numbers are low and continue to fall.”

Speaking of his own university, the Johns Hopkins University, he says, “I would be hard-pressed to name a single tenured professor in the social sciences and humanities who is openly right of center in any reasonable understanding of the term.” So as I say, we’re not talking about an imbalance, we’re talking about an evacuation. Now, at this point, I think the most important first observation is that this article has appeared in the first place.

Now, it has spawned a conversation and a debate. We’re going to look at that together. It also raises huge questions for evangelical Christians that honestly go far beyond the questions that are raised even in this important opinion piece and in the response that it has set a fire in higher education.

Here are some of the facts. John A. Shields professor at Claremont McKenna College, we’re told that he has summarized the basic trend outside of economics as a field, “The percentages of conservatives in the social science and humanities disciplines have dropped to the single digits.” Teles goes on to say, “In my own field of political science, Pippa Norris of Harvard University’s Kennedy School has found that the cohort born in 1990, the newly minted full professors of today is considerably further to the left than those born in 1960. By the way, those are now approaching retirement.

So you think about the ’60s as a liberal age, well, it turns out that was just a hint of things to come. Fast forward to the current moment and currently newly elected full professors, and my goodness, they are so far on the left, the people who were on the left in our previous generation wouldn’t recognize them. Now, Teles thing goes on to make a point, and this isn’t the language of higher education, but trust me, this is important. He says, “The university’s ideological narrowing has advanced so far that even liberal institutionalist, faculty who believe universities should be places of intellectual pluralism and adhere to the traditional academic norms of merit and free inquiry are in decline.”

Now, that turns out to be a big issue here. These liberal institutionalists are like those older faculty. They’re liberals who believe that at least a part of being liberal is to want the presence of opposing viewpoints and to oppose viewpoint discrimination. And yet, they’re now effectively the fundamentalists on the campus. And even they are now deeply concerned. And quite honestly, the fact is that younger faculty, far more ideologically on the left want to get rid of these fossils because even the liberal institutionalists are just far too conservative for the new leftist driving America’s campus culture.

Now, Teles does a good job at setting out various arguments. One of the arguments is that it’s a discrimination based theory of accomplishment, says that you have considerations that are taken in when it comes out to defining who is the most qualified candidate for a position. “When as is certainly the case in academe, there are a great many qualified candidates for any position. Discrimination becomes more evident at the population level.”

So we’re talking about who makes the selection of who gets in the list of those who are to be considered, and then how does it move from there? He goes on to say, “There is some evidence that conservatives are discriminated against in some of these classic forms, but not much.” So to his credit, he says, “This is a huge problem. There is an evacuation of conservatives from the campus,” but he says, “The selection of faculty in terms of who is actually interviewed and in that population, that doesn’t explain adequately that’s his argument why conservatives are absent.

Part III

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If You Remove the Religious, You Also Remove the Conservatives – Secularists Know What They’re Doing When They Take Over the Universities

And so there’s some other arguments that come in. Number one, conservatives are just avoiding higher education in terms of employment. They may get their PhDs in one of these areas, but they are going into work for think tanks, other organizations because they find the campus, so inhospitable. The second thing is you have field selection. And this is absolutely relevant. This is a huge issue. So you have certain fields in which only leftists even believe the field is real.

You have so many of these made up disciplines driven by the ideologies of the Left. It is impossible that you would have a conservative professor in one of these fields because the field itself is so inherently leftist. And they say, “Look, we’re not discriminating.” And if they mean we’re not turning down conservative applicants, well, it’s because no conservative is going to apply. Get a clue.

Okay. Teles is honest about answering why there are few conservatives left in higher academia. He writes, “Some make the case that conservatives are to put it bluntly stupider than those to their left.” Well, okay, you might be a little bit offended, but let’s just say it took some courage to write that sentence. Is it true that conservatives are just stupider? Okay, obviously, I don’t believe that’s true, but here’s what I think is at play there. And I think this is Teles’s point.

There are a lot of conservatives who aren’t going into higher education precisely because they look at the entire terrain and say, “It’s just not worth it. Why would I give myself to earning a PhD in that field and fighting all the intellectual battles I would have to fight only not to have a job on the other side anyway?” And again, Teles is just very honest. He speaks about his own doctoral committee, his dissertation committee at the University of Virginia. And he speaks of three “extraordinarily learned and serious conservative thinkers.” He lists them here, and then he says, “30 years later, I cannot think of a top political science department in the country where one could put together such a committee.” So there aren’t even token conservatives on many of the faculties that are in consideration here in elite academia.

So, okay, that’s the Teles argument. I’ve obviously just tried to summarize it. I think it’s incredibly important. Important, first of all, that it happened and then incredibly important because of the arguments he makes, the concessions about the reality of American higher education he documents here. But that produced some controversy. And then The Chronicle invited a series of responses from across elite faculties. And there’s some conservatives here, older conservatives in the main who are responding.

Mark Lilla who is a very prominent political thinker. He’s not a conservative, but he documents the fact he’s been concerned about this for a long time and even wrote about it in the past. But then he says, “If asked to create a syllabus today on contemporary right-wing thought, I have trouble imagining who might stand in as a representative of the old conservative tradition I wrote about in 2009.”

Let’s just say 2009 is not ancient history, but he is talking about something that’s important to all of us, and that is the distinction between the right and conservatism. Conservatism is on the right, but there are people on the Right who are not legitimately conservative. And so that’s at least an interesting point. You also have someone arguing from the Left. The Left says the university isn’t woke. This one professor says, “It’s not woke. It’s never been woke. It is entrenched business interests, and it is very wealthy families who send their very well-supported children to these elite universities.”

And they’re socially liberal, maybe even politically liberal, but they represent an enduring kind of aristocracy. Well, again, from the left, you can understand why they would say that. But the point we would make is, yes, they’re politically, ideologically and socially liberal. That’s the point.

Zena Hitz, who’s a tutor at St. John’s College says that the problem is hostility to religion. Now, let me just mention that I did a Thinking in Public conversation with Zena Hitz you can find at my website. We’ll put the link with today’s edition of The Briefing. I think she’s really onto something here. She writes, “Hostility to religion is the most virulent form of prejudice against conservatives on campus.” She says, “Conservatives are not even its sole victims.” That’s her point.

Even those who aren’t conservative who turn out to be religious in any kind of public way, they are met with opposition. And as she writes, “Religion is permitted only if expressed in terms of progressive politics.” Obviously, she doesn’t believe that’s legitimate and with a great deal of intelligence and verve, she writes of the fact that the university ought to look like humanity. And by the way, get a clue. Once again, humanity is overwhelmingly religious. And I’ll just use her term, but you get the point. It is this secularization. And secularism on these campuses that is driving out people. And once again, the Christian worldview explains why there is a correlation between belief in God and more conservative understandings of, say, politics and morality and all the rest.

It all fits together. And when one is evacuated, guess what? The other is evacuated as well. You evacuate religious discourse on the campus, religious identity, you make it costly to identify as a religious believer on a campus. Guess what? There are fewer conservatives because the two do go together. And let’s understand something. Both sides do know it.

Brian Leiter writes back. He says, “It’s not so much partisanship that’s caused this, it’s the very nature of scholarship.” I’ll just tell you this one irritated me more than any other because he goes on to say, “Look, education, higher education should be entirely about the sciences.” Now, I’ll just say to his credit, he does at least understand that a lot of the ideologically leftist departments on campus are not sciences. They’re just merely invented. But he does represent the fact that in his view, the greatness of the American university is how it emulates or emulated the German University, the rise of the German University, the modern university in the late 19th century and into the 20th century reducing every legitimate discipline to a wissenschaft.

That is to say, to science, that’s the reason, by the way, that university-based theology went so liberal in the German universities. That’s one of the reasons why the toxins of liberal theology is often referred to as German higher criticism or German liberal theology, not an accident that it came out of the context of the emergence of the German University that said, “The only legitimate form of knowledge is a wissenschaft. It is a science.” Well, you understand where that can lead. You understand indeed where it led.

Another of, I think the really important submissions in this series is by Professor Ruth Wisse, who is Professor Emerita of Yiddish literature and comparative literature at Harvard University. She’s done some really good work in terms of what’s happened to the American University and in particular her beloved Harvard. But she writes this, and this is really important, “Without tracing all the administrative faculty and student measures that have progressively shut down intellectual diversity, we can be certain that wherever coalitions claiming progress stake to their claim, they will hold onto power as tenaciously as Ayatollahs.”

Now, here’s what’s really important. I hope Christian parents are listening to this and Christian students, and those who are considering higher education, younger students. You need to know this, much of the liberalism, much of the leftist ideology and the activism that is found in American colleges and universities today is not just on the faculty. In even more virulent form, it is often in student services offices.

And when you look at the bureaucracies of higher education, you are looking at a tribe that is becoming, if it has not already become, so intellectually and politically leftist, that it is just hostile terrain for anyone who doesn’t buy into that leftist ideology. And I’ll tell you, I have had the honor of speaking on some of the most elite college campuses, university campuses in the United States, and the opposition has come from that kind of office, even when faculty offered support.

So we’re going to have to leave this, but in the exchange in response to the Teles article, it’s interesting, there’s some who said conservatives are absent, and there is a good explanation for that, and it’s probably a good thing too. We understand what we’re up against, but I have to tell you, none of the conservative responses actually have any kind of concrete plan for how this can be reversed. And frankly, reading the articles, there doesn’t appear to be much hope that it can be reversed either. And these liberal institutionalists who used to be those on the left who are now being threatened by those on an even further left, they appear to be among some of the least hopeful about any course of correction.

And that’s what Christians understand. And on this, we’re going to have to close that when these major institutions cross a certain worldview ideological barrier, it’s very difficult to understand how recovery can ever come. Now, I’m not saying recovery can’t ever come. That’s beyond anything we should claim. I’m simply going to say there is no reasonable, rational explanation at present of how any recovery should come. And parents and students, and all Christians concerned about future generations should understand what we are up against in American higher education. And then I say as a seminary and college president, with thankfully, at least a few exceptions.