What happens when the noble goal of social justice is invoked in ways that corrupt rather than improve?
Before immigrating to America from Russia as a young academic, Alexander Barvinok lived under a repressive regime that he experienced as “systemic absurdity.” He is now a tenured mathematics professor at the University of Michigan. Earlier this year, he resigned his three-decade membership in the American Mathematical Society in a letter citing the group’s failure to oppose the growing number of job openings for mathematics faculty that require applicants to draft and submit a statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. He regards these statements as a gravely concerning trend for his discipline, and he wanted to register some sort of protest against them.
Painful experiences long ago convinced Barvinok that requirements to affirm any ideal are corrosive in academia.
“I grew up in the Soviet Union, where people had to affirm their fealty to ideals, and the leaders embodying those ideals, on a daily basis,” he told me. “As years went by, I observed the remarkable ease with which passionate communists turned first into passionate pro-Western liberals and then into passionate nationalists. This lived experience and also common sense convince me that only true conformists excel in this game. Do we really want our math departments to be populated by conformists?”
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Barvinok insists that it isn’t diversity to which he objects. Any coerced statement, he says, would trouble him as much. “Even if one is required to say ‘I passionately believe that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn,’” he wrote in his resignation letter, “the routine affirmation of one’s beliefs as a precondition of making a living constitutes compelled speech and corrupts everyone who participates in the performance.”
Anytime an immigrant who experienced the Soviet Union frets about growing ideological coercion in the United States, I pay attention. No one knows more about what it feels like when the noble goal of social justice is invoked in ways that coerce and corrupt rather than improve, and I was curious how Barvinok would compare and contrast the different academic cultures he has experienced. Barvinok agreed to correspond with me. What follows is his account of the life experiences that informed his opposition to DEI statements and helped motivate him to take a stand against their spread. His story made me realize how important it is for professors to speak up when they disagree with campus orthodoxies.
Barvinok began his academic career in 1980, enrolling in the math department of a university then named for the Stalin-era propagandist Andrei Zhdanov in the city then named Leningrad. Unlike “the ideologically infested humanities, the road to mathematics was wide open to all, except to those who had ‘Jew’ written in their passports,” he explained. “Although my father was Jewish and emigrated to Israel in 1973, I had ‘Russian’ written in that ‘5th line,’”—which recorded nationality—“and was admitted.”
The math curriculum was rigorous—less so courses in the history of the Communist Party, dialectical materialism, and the political economy of capitalism. “Whatever this indoctrination was meant to achieve, what it really achieved was the widespread cynicism and strong allergy to anything having ‘communist’ or ‘the party’ in it among my classmates,” he recalled.
Barvinok graduated first in his class in 1985. Job assignments were made by a committee that graduate students visited in the order of their GPA. Because Barvinok was the first to enter the committee room, all jobs should have been available to him. But the committee told him it had nothing to offer. “It was probably a combination of my Jewish father, the Jewish-sounding patronymic of my Russian-Ukrainian mother, or my inappropriate smirk noticed by members of the Party Committee on some solemn occasions,” he wrote. Still, he was able to pursue graduate studies in math.
“In 1985, Gorbachev came to power,” he wrote. “Graduate students still had a mandatory seminar in philosophy, but now one could get away with heresies previously unheard of. One substitute teacher argued that Einstein would have discovered way more had he lived in the Soviet Union and been well-versed in Marxist philosophy. A friend of mine (currently a professor at MIT) retorted that Einstein, as a Jew, wouldn’t have been admitted to the university in the first place and would have ended up a conscript in the Soviet Army. The teacher just stared in disbelief, but nothing happened. If such an exchange occurred a couple of years before, it would have led to immediate expulsion from the university, if not worse. Under Stalin people served time in labor camps for failing to endorse Engels’s description of Newton as an ‘inductive ass’ (donkey).”
Barvinok married in 1985. In 1988, he defended his mathematics thesis, “Combinatorial Theory of Polytopes With Symmetry and Its Applications to Combinatorial Optimization Problems.” In 1991, he and his wife had a son. By 1992, the Soviet Union had disintegrated. “Hyperinflation was a problem. We had nowhere to live,” he wrote. “I undertook to translate R. P. Stanley’s classical book Enumerative Combinatorics into Russian, hoping to use the honorarium to improve our living conditions. By the time I finished, the honorarium was worth one subway token.”
Later that year, he secured a postdoc position at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He spent 1993 at Cornell. And in 1994, he moved to his current home, the University of Michigan. Having never taught at all in any language, he found his first semester lecturing in English difficult, but before long he felt confident on the job, and he earned tenure in 1997.
When did he first fret about the political environment in American universities? Looking back, he recalls steady growth in three broad trends that he began to notice sometime in the early 2000s. “Initially, as an American professor, you were in good standing if you taught well, did reasonable research, and were a good colleague, which was demonstrated by your willingness to do committee work,” he recalled. “The first trend I noticed was that to count as a ‘good citizen,’ you were increasingly expected to contribute, so to speak, to the betterment of humanity at large.”
In particular, he recalled the National Science Foundation introducing a requirement starting in 1997 to describe the “broader impacts” of research proposals and how that changed the experience of participating as an expert on panels convened to judge grant applications. In a few cases, applicants he knew as “excellent mathematicians” and “pretty decent individuals” would describe their research objectives with care, knowledge, and enthusiasm, whereas in the mandatory “broader impact” section, they would have “nothing better to say than that they plan to write joint papers with women and supervise female graduate students,” something that outraged some members of the panel.
“I understood the outrage, of course, but for me it was an indication that this perhaps well-intended requirement was in fact ill-advised, as it pushed otherwise decent people to behave in a silly, sometimes obnoxious manner,” he reflected. “It also appeared that the university and college policies in hiring, and to some extent promotions and merit raises, were increasingly motivated by the desire to effect some positive social changes, in the form of a contribution to DEI.”
Barvinok has learned to doubt that policies mandated in the name of positive social change necessarily result in it. “I am suspicious of an institutional requirement to do public good,” he wrote. “As an admirer of Leo Tolstoy, I couldn’t help but recall his remark from War and Peace that a man, when not overwhelmed by a passion, never knows what the public good is, but a man committing a crime always knows for sure what it is. The main responsibility of every Soviet citizen was to facilitate the arrival of communism, where people would contribute to the society according to their abilities and receive from the society according to their needs—has there ever been a nobler-sounding goal? And yet historians cannot agree on an estimate of how many millions of people were starved to death, tortured to death, or worked to death, all in the name of that goal.”
The second trend that Barvinok began to notice in the aughts was the growth of college administrators and the growing coherence of the messages issued by the administrators across institutions. Today, the University of Michigan’s DEI bureaucracy is huge: According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Michigan’s DEI structure, with $85 million in initial funding and more than 100 employees contributing at least part time to diversity efforts, is widely considered among the most ambitious and well-funded offices in the nation.” Multiple pages on the University of Michigan website emphasize efforts to infuse DEI values into faculty hiring, research, and more.
The third trend he noticed was the changing nature of debate. More and more often, someone would claim that an argument was harming a particular demographic, often without specifying how. As he recalls it, “It was at this ‘harm’ stage that people became afraid to speak their minds.”
In Barvinok’s telling, the three trends he described—the institutional requirement to do public good, the growth of the academic bureaucracy, and the accusations of causing harm to silence opponents—are interrelated. “The more social goals one wants to effect, and the more ambitious they are, the more administrators one needs, who in turn may put forth new social goals or make the existing ones more ambitious,” he explained. “If you are convinced that what you do is in the public good, then clearly your opponent is causing harm.” Furthermore, if someone’s actions fail to advance progress (as self-styled reformers see it) quickly and smoothly, or have the opposite effect, there’s a tendency “to search for the enemies within, who hinder the effort, maybe unwittingly.”
I pressed Barvinok for an example from his field of someone being treated like “an enemy within.” He cited an opinion piece by Abigail Thompson, published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Thompson, a mathematics professor at UC Davis, spoke approvingly of DEI efforts at large, but criticized mandatory DEI statements and compared them to the loyalty oaths of the 1950s.
“There’s no room in today’s world for a both-sides-ism approach whether it’s in math or politics or any other venue,” one critic wrote to the editors of the publication. “I believe you have made a grave and very damaging mistake by publishing this piece.” Scores of mathematicians signed a group letter that declared the mere publication of her perspective harmful. Thompson had supporters too, some of whom signed a group letter calling the controversy “a direct attempt to destroy Thompson’s career” and “an attempt to intimidate the AMS into publishing only articles that hew to a very specific point of view.”
Barvinok was stunned by vitriol in some of the unsympathetic responses. “Not only the opinion of the author, but also the decision of the AMS to publish that opinion was deemed harmful,” he recalled. “It rang some bells from the history of the Soviet Union. When Lenin and later Stalin fought various opposition factions within the party, the heretics were accused of not only being wrong, but also of ‘attempting to impose a discussion on the party.’”
On June 26, 2020, about a month after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, an email addressed to the math department arrived in his inbox. In it, the department chairman told everyone that a math-department committee that focuses on the “climate” of the department, with the vetting of the department’s executive committee, had written a statement on the department’s response to racism.
It contained the following lines:
We understand and acknowledge that systemic racism permeates all aspects of our society. We acknowledge that systemic racism permeates the culture of our own institution and department. For this we are deeply sorry; we know that we have work to do.
Once again, Barvinok thought of the society he’d left as a young man.
“In my memory from Brezhnev to more recent Putin times, the slogan ‘We have work to do’ served as an unmistakable indicator that no work would be done, as those who work don’t have an appetite for sloganeering,” he told me. “Still, to gather my wits, I decided to do some work of my own and went to wash the deck of my house.” When he returned, an email to the whole math faculty by a fellow professor was in his inbox. The math department’s email, it read, “essentially states that the majority of my colleagues are racists, a false accusation which I refuse to join.”
Barvinok then responded himself. “I wrote a couple emails to the effect that the department has no business making political (or religious, or artistic, or gastronomical) statements on behalf of its members, and suggested that those who support the statement should just sign it,” he told me. “It became clear then that people were afraid to voice their opinion, unless it was aligned with what was perceived as the dominant narrative. There were many fewer people who expressed their disapproval of the statement publicly than those who did it privately.”
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Though Barvinok chose to speak up, he understood why others feared doing so and kept their dissenting opinions private. “Across the country, people were indeed fired from their jobs for saying things that were deemed harmful, and tenure seemed like a flimsy protection,” he recalled. (In The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott wrote that in the early aughts, firings of professors were few and far between, but that “from just 2014 to mid-2023, we know of more than 1,000 attempts to get professors fired, punished, or otherwise silenced,” and that “about two-thirds of these attempts are successful, resulting in consequences from investigation to termination.”)
At the same time, the stakes were never nearly as dire as those in the society he’d left. As he put it, “Unlike in the Soviet Union and today’s Russia, it appeared that no one was sent to a labor camp, prison, or psychiatric ward. Another big difference with the Soviet practices was that to have the support of a few colleagues was often enough to stem the tide.”
He argues that, unlike in the Soviet system, dissenters in the U.S. system can achieve safety in numbers. “It is one thing to discipline one offender and totally another to discipline a whole group,” he explained. “With a group, who will be held responsible for allowing the nest of heretics to develop in the first place? It looks much more rational just to ignore it. In contrast, the Soviet Union would spare no resources to eliminate all offenders and also to give ‘what for’ to their relatives, friends, friends of relatives, and relatives of friends. As we know, the practice ended badly for the Soviet Union. It is my hope that this crucial difference is here to stay.”
A survey of 1,500 faculty in the U.S. conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that half of respondents considered such statements “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” If Barvinok’s analysis is correct, that cohort could speak out against DEI statements without significant risk to their career, if only they coordinate and do so in numbers.
Then again, the longer the current system is in place, the harder it may be to reform––if hiring processes are biased in favor of a given ideology, and against those who dissent from it, the faction benefiting from bias will come to dominate the institution over time. As Barvinok put it in his letter to the American Mathematical Society, “I anticipate an argument that the AMS is ‘not involved in politics.’ But this is the kind of ‘politics’ that, rephrasing Pericles, will get involved with you, whether you like it or not, and hence inaction is just as political as action.”
For dissenters, the best time to speak up is now.
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