What DEI threatens isn’t merit. It’s monopoly.

A few days ago, Jonathan Berk, a professor of finance at the Graduate School of Business, responded to a piece by professor Elliott White Jr., an assistant professor of earth system science, writing that DEI has no place at Stanford.

To make this argument, he offers a story about a friend who grew up poor in the American South. Berk describes his friend as having worked hard, overcome a difficult home life, and eventually made it to Rice University. 

Berk concludes this story by saying a modern day admissions officer “would not have made the call.”

“You see, my friend is white,” Berk offers, as though revealing the twist at the end of some mystery. The implication is clear: poor white students are now disadvantaged by an admissions system supposedly more taken by the stories of Black poverty than white poverty. This is a claim Berk makes with absolutely no evidence.

But the argument descends further. Berk asserts — without irony — that in contrast to today, “After WWII and the GI Bill, private universities like Stanford became places that provided opportunities to bright young minds from all strata in society.”

Let me be clear: This statement is patently false.

Take, for example, Ira Katznelson’s landmark book “When Affirmative Action Was White“. In this now-famous work, Katznelson painstakingly lays out what is well known among historians and social scientists: how Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal policies were structured in ways that systematically advantaged white Americans while excluding Black Americans.

Berk romanticizes the post-WWII period, claiming that the GI Bill opened the doors of elite universities like Stanford to bright students “from all strata of society.” But as Katznelson shows, like other federal programs of the era, the GI Bill was administered locally — allowing southern officials to discriminate with impunity. As a result, Black veterans were often denied access to the very benefits white veterans used to attend college, buy homes, and build wealth.

In fact, Katznelson documents how fewer than 100 of the 3,229 VA home loans distributed in Mississippi in 1947 went to Black veterans. Similar patterns held across the South and even in parts of the North. And when it came to higher education, most Black veterans were funneled into chronically underfunded HBCUs, as predominantly white institutions continued to exclude them either formally or through informal means.

Stanford was no exception. According to a guide from the Stanford Libraries: “[P]rior to the mid-1960s, Stanford admitted few Black students, and offered limited support to those who were admitted. Users will find few records of Black students in the archives dating before the mid-1960s. The change in admissions and support came about through direct action of Black students and other students of color.” In other words, Stanford’s openness to “bright young minds from all strata of society” was neither natural nor automatic — it was the result of struggle and resistance.

And Berk tells another tale. “If you are unlucky enough to draw the poverty card, it does not matter what race you belong to,” he writes.

In his 1965 commencement address at Howard University, Lyndon Johnson declared: “For Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences —deep, corrosive, obstinate differences — radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.”

Lyndon Johnson understood something that Berk either willfully ignores or cannot comprehend: that we cannot talk about poverty in this country without talking about race, and we cannot talk about race without confronting the history of a government that plundered, colonized, and stole from Black people and Filipinos — groups Berk conveniently mentions in his piece. We cannot understand the differences in upward mobility between a young Black person and a young white person — both growing up poor —without reckoning with the legacy of redlining, exclusion, and the enduring racial wealth gap.

We are a university. And at our best, we are a university committed to truth and to truth-seeking. If we are to be a university of the future, we must commit ourselves to bringing the best and the brightest to our campus — from wherever they hail — and we must acknowledge the sad reality that markers of difference still so heavily shape who gets to enjoy the privileges of this place.

Sure; it may sound inspiring to say, “It doesn’t matter where you start in this country.” It may be the kind of thing one says in a talk to a group of CEOs or from the stage of a TED talk. But it is not fact. It is fiction. It is running away from an inconvenient truth. It is ideology posing as insight. It is narrative attempting to substitute for evidence and history.

Here’s the truth: White Americans — white men especially — who didn’t need to compete against a broad-based pool because of gender and racial discrimination; who have long enjoyed access to neighborhoods and networks, jobs, clubs, and government programs that systematically excluded others; and who continue to enjoy the presumption of expertise even when they are far outside their depth — have long been the original beneficiaries of race and gender-based affirmative action in this country.

So when we look around and see that Black students are underrepresented on this campus relative to their share of the population… when we see that so many of our students come from circumstances of wealth and privilege… when we know that some portion of our students benefit from legacy status… we must say plainly that affirmative action — a DEI program — comes in many forms.

And, therefore, it makes sense that so many are so vehemently opposed to so-called DEI programs they perceive benefit those long locked out of places like Stanford.

These folks often say that they are concerned that DEI threatens merit. The real horror they confront is that DEI threatens monopoly.

Hakeem Jefferson is an assistant professor of political science and faculty director of the Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

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