Dear Colleague,
Each of us has devoted our careers to higher education. We disagree on significant issues, from the war in Gaza, to the effectiveness of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Yet we continue to work together, side by side.
One of us has worked in social justice and inclusion at a Big Ten university—talking to everyone from custodial staff to academic scholars about DEI. Two of us run higher education programming at a nonprofit organization. All three of us have served as campus faculty.
We have all noticed the same troubling pattern: DEI has become politically charged, publicly contested, and, in some places, dismantled.
The backlash against DEI reveals what happens when people retreat into their corners and stop engaging with one another. We are living through a profound moment of fragmentation: “I’m right; you’re wrong” culture.
We have all lost the plot.
We’re not here to argue the merits or criticisms of DEI; that ship has sailed. But we are here to talk about the real fractures that resulted, how to fix them, and how to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
For the three of us, our relationship is rooted in pluralism, the belief that perfect agreement is neither possible nor necessary. What matters is remaining in dialogue with one another while pursuing shared possibility. Over the past six years, we have watched many higher education institutions lose sight of this principle. It is time to chart a different course.
Many of the foundational ideas behind early DEI efforts had the goal of fuller understanding of human complexity. Civil rights advocate and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw's framework of intersectionality was never intended to flatten people into categories or sort them permanently into ideological camps. Its purpose was to illuminate how overlapping systems of identity and power shape lived experience in layered, often invisible ways.
Along the way, many institutions lost sight of this nuance and how to expand the ways we engage across difference. Accountability became intertwined with shame. Shame became conflated with harm. Harm hardened into polarization. And polarization made genuine relationship-building across difference nearly impossible.
When people fear humiliation more than they trust the possibility of growth, communities fracture.
We have witnessed this dynamic in institutions we care deeply about. We have been in meetings where tension became so intense that curiosity disappeared before the conversation even began. We have seen disagreement treated as a threat rather than an opportunity for learning. We have watched people retreat into ideological certainty, curated communities, and increasingly rigid social boundaries because certainty often feels safer than complexity.
None of this is sustainable for democracy.
DEI challenged institutions to confront histories of exclusion, expand opportunity, and affirm the humanity of those long pushed to the margins. Those goals remain important. Yet some approaches to implementation also contributed to the polarization we continue to navigate today.
Political theorist Danielle Allen argues that democracy rests not on perfect agreement but on the difficult practice of political friendship—the willingness to remain bound to one another despite disagreement, sacrifice, and uncertainty. At a moment when civic trust feels increasingly fragile, this idea is especially salient.
History shows us this principle in examples like Michael Lerner and Dr. Cornel West. At the NAACP Summit in 1994, Lerner stood among protesters while West participated inside the gathering. When they encountered one another, they embraced warmly, affirming their mutual respect and affection before returning to a vigorous disagreement over the summit’s purpose and politics.
Their debates continued for decades. Yet disagreement never erased their friendship or their shared commitment to strengthening Black-Jewish relations and advancing social healing.
Their example offers an important lesson. Democracy is not sustained by the absence of disagreement. It is sustained by relationships strong enough to endure it.
Scholar Diana Eck has long argued that pluralism is not synonymous with diversity. Diversity is simply the fact of difference. Pluralism, she writes, is the “energetic engagement with that diversity.” It is a disciplined, relational practice that asks institutions not merely to acknowledge difference but to engage it constructively.
We believe pluralism deserves renewed attention -- not as a substitute for DEI, but as essential for securing our democracy and the institutions we care about.
America's founders envisioned a nation in which religious and civic differences would be welcomed. They frequently failed to live up to that vision. Yet they articulated democratic ideals larger than their own limitations and biases, creating space for future generations to pursue a more perfect union.
Pluralism offers a pathway for people with fundamentally different identities, beliefs, histories, and worldviews to remain in relationship while engaging those differences honestly and respectfully.
Pluralism neither abandons equity nor attempts to rank whose suffering matters most. It recognizes that inequities and injustices are real and consequential, while also recognizing that they do not fully define who we are.
It expands our ability to pursue justice without reducing individuals to fixed categories such as oppressor or oppressed. In doing so, it preserves the richness and complexity of our individual and collective stories.
Authoritarianism thrives in fragmented societies. It grows where people become isolated, distrustful, fearful, and unable to recognize shared humanity. Polarization creates conditions in which fear is easier to mobilize than hope and certainty becomes more appealing than complexity.
When communities stop practicing curiosity, listening, and relationship-building across differences, democracy weakens.
Generation Z, Generation Alpha, and the students who follow them are coming of age amid profound social fragmentation. Many are growing up in digital environments that offer fewer opportunities to navigate face-to-face conflict, tolerate discomfort, and engage in nuanced dialogue. They often feel connected online while struggling with loneliness, anxiety, and uncertainty in person.
As educators and professionals, we have a responsibility to preserve higher education as a laboratory for democratic learning, where students can develop the habits and skills necessary to become engaged, compassionate citizens.
At the same time, they are inheriting political instability, declining trust in institutions, rising extremism, and widening social divisions.
In this environment, pluralism becomes more than an educational framework. It becomes part of the civic glue that holds a diverse democracy together.
We must help students develop the capacity to stay at the table when tensions rise. To resist reducing one another to single stories. To understand that no visible identity can fully explain a person's experiences, fears, struggles, strengths, or humanity.
Colleges and universities can begin now by imagining a different kind of campus life, one where civil discourse is not an emergency intervention, but a daily practice woven into curriculum, cocurricular programs, and the ordinary rhythms of student life. This work includes preparing faculty and staff to guide difficult conversations, yes, but it also requires something quieter and more relational: creating more moments where students can meet one another across difference in ways that feel natural, unforced, and Supported.
These moments matter. When students gather in spaces that are informal and lowstakes, over meals, in residence halls, between classes, they often share the parts of themselves they are most proud of: the traditions they carry, the communities that shaped them, the languages they speak at home, the values that anchor their lives. These are not points of contention; they are points of connection. When campuses treat difference as an asset rather than a liability, students begin to build cultural competency and empathy not through formal instruction alone but through the simple act of being in relationship. In those everyday exchanges, they learn that difference is not something to fear or fix. It is something to meet, honor, and to grow from.
As authoritarianism gains ground and the fracturing of the body politic deepens, America stands at an inflection point. We can continue retreating into separate communities shaped by fear, suspicion, and ideological rigidity. Or we can commit ourselves to the slower, harder, and more imperfect work of building democratic cultures rooted in curiosity, accountability, complexity, and shared humanity.
Pluralism is not a weakness. It is the democratic muscle our nation needs to hold our universities and our republic together.
In difference,
Dr. Melissa Carter, Director of Student Life & Partnerships, Interfaith America
Dr. Fernie Rodriguez, Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, University of Minnesota
Dr. Todd Green, Senior Director of Campus Partnerships, Interfaith America
Footnote need - Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (HarperCollins, 2001); or The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, “What Is Pluralism?,” https://pluralism.org/pluralism.
