Recently, Forbes published a news report entitled, "Chief Diversity Officers Are Set Up to Fail." The article draws on a survey of a group of Fortune 500 Chief Diversity Officers to ask them what they need to succeed. The article points to CDOs stating that they do not having enough experience, power, or data to accomplish their role. In particular the article reported that, "All of the leaders surveyed reported that diversity and inclusion came in last on a list of eight potential business priorities for their companies."
And interestingly, as to higher ed in particular, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a study from September 2018 about Chief Diversity Officers. The claim there was that CDOs likely had no significant impact on the diversification of representation in higher education.
The "diversity as low priority" problem is nothing new. The disconnect between business priorities and achieving diversity (whatever that means–it can mean many things to different people) seems to be indicative of our current atmosphere around diversity and inclusion–a kind of diversity-as-tolerance (as I've discussed before) which takes advantage of being seen as diverse for profit, and as Nancy Leong has pointed out, faking such diversity, without there being an authentic commitment to inclusion and transformation of institutional culture.
The law appears particularly vulnerable to this problem. We can point to examples of the perception of a lack of commitment to diverse representation in law firms, law practice, and law schools. All of which are microcosms of the society's shallow thoughts about diversity and inclusion. And this is ironic given the legal profession's mission to protect vulnerable minorities.
Maybe "diversity" as idea is in the midst of an existential crisis–despite good intentions it may appear meaningless, and thus becomes difficult to make manifest. Or maybe all of this reflects the comfort with the patterns of white supremacy, and thus the lip service to diversity is simply a cover for maintaining a structural status quo. And maybe — a thought I would never have thought of saying four years ago — some people in power actually want the rising tide of renewed white heteronormative patriarchal supremacy to take us back to some old, subordinationist notion of when America was "great," and thus diversity in fact is (for these folks) poison.
The existential crisis that diversity faces doesn't excuse ending the search for answers. Such answers are now more important than ever–if one believes that American institutions, for-profit and nonprofit, private and public, ought to represent all of the people. These recent thoughts about Chief Diversity Officers and their apparent ineffectiveness would suggest some basic starting places for the search – finding a working definition of diversity, setting that vision as part of the institutional vision, and most importantly making it a real, measurable priority to achieve that vision.
The priority at the bottom of the list rarely gets achieved.