In a debate that drew several sharp exchanges and a capacity crowd at the Harvard Institute of Politics on Tuesday evening, Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, and Cornell William Brooks, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and former head of the NAACP, sat down to discuss one of the current moment’s hottest of hot-button issues: the role of diversity in higher education.
In his opening remarks, Brooks, the Hauser professor of the practice of nonprofit institutions and professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice, said that he had specifically requested Roberts as a sparring partner in the debate. A historian who has led the Heritage Foundation since 2021, Roberts was one of the central architects of Project 2025, the 900-page document that became a blueprint for the second Trump administration’s policy agenda, including its efforts to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in schools and universities across the country. The document recommended dismantling federal DEI programs and offices, as well as removing race- and gender-based terminology from federal regulations, contracts, and grants. It also proposed shuttering the U.S. Department of Education and using civil-rights enforcement powers to target DEI programs at private companies and institutions.
But the conversation’s main point of contention wasn’t whether diversity itself is a desirable aspiration—both men affirmed that it is, although Roberts said he preferred the term “pluralism.” Where they disagreed was on the question of how much progress, particularly racial progress, has been made during the past half-century, and whether DEI and affirmative action programs remain justified.
For Roberts, the answer was no. Citing “tremendous progress” since the civil rights era, he described modern-day DEI programs as “harmful to the social cohesion of the academic community” and at odds with civility and merit. Such programs, he said, stifle what he called “true diversity.” He pointed to the Crimson’s annual surveys of graduating seniors, in which only about 10 percent of students tend to say they are conservative. “If diversity is so important to institutions of higher education, why aren’t there more people willing to identify themselves as conservatives?” Roberts said. “It’s because of the rotten fruit that DEI has created.”
Brooks disputed the argument that DEI causes division—“That’s like confusing aspirin with the headache,” he said—and pushed back against the claim that discrimination and inequality belong to “some distant age in the past,” citing studies that continue to show disparities in all areas of American life, including education. “All across this country, diversity has been brought into being by blood, sweat, tears, protests, demonstrations, and assertions of the people’s will,” Brooks said. “What we’ve seen is the successive, iterative, incomplete, imperfect expansion of diversity and meritocracy.”
Diversity, he added later, cannot be simply secured and then left “on autopilot”; it must be fought for by successive generations. “How do you have viewpoint diversity,” he said, “without diversity among those who hold the views?”
The discussion was moderated by Washington Post reporter Laura Meckler, who pressed both men on their arguments. She asked Roberts to account for an apparent contradiction, between the Trump administration’s stated goal—“urged on by the Heritage Foundation,” she said—of reducing the federal government’s role in education, while at the same time it aggressively seeks to dictate what DEI-related policies schools and universities must adopt or abandon. “The Trump administration specifically has demanded extraordinary changes here at Harvard,” Meckler noted, “down to the demanding ideological diversity in every single program within the University.”
Roberts responded that in attempting roll back DEI programs and mandate “ideological diversity,” the administration is “trying to correct what we see as, at the very least, bad policy, and what has been an injustice.” He also suggested that universities like Harvard can refuse federal loans and research funding if they do not wish to be told what to do. (As president of Wyoming Catholic College during the Obama administration, Roberts rejected federal funding to preserve the school’s religious-freedom-based right to resist regulations regarding birth control and same-sex marriage.)
Meckler pushed Brooks on the tension that many people perceive between diversity and merit in college admissions: “the idea…that there would be people who aren’t admitted, who might in fact deserve that spot too, but they didn’t check the right demographic box.”
Brooks answered by pointing out demographic boxes that often convey an advantage yet don’t provoke the same kind of criticism: preferences for athletes, legacy students, the children of donors or faculty. More than once during the discussion, Roberts advocated for race-neutral diversity policies, based on factors like geography, income, and first-generation status. Brooks agreed with the benefit of those programs but argued that they don’t eliminate the need to promote racial diversity. He also noted that those programs don’t attract as much anti-DEI outrage, despite raising potential questions about merit versus diversity. “I’m not casting aspersions—I’m simply saying we have to have an honest conversation,” Brooks said. “There’s a tendency under this administration to talk about merit only when it comes to black and brown people.”
As the event ended, after a lively back and forth with audience questions, Meckler asked each panelist for one closing thought. Roberts thanked Brooks for an “intellectually honest” conversation, and added that when he argues for diversity programs based on factors other than race, “it’s not to deny the injustice that has happened in this country’s history.” Instead, he insisted, “This is an honest-to-goodness policy disagreement about the kinds of policies that work.”
Brooks thanked Roberts for participating in the debate and recounted a story about civil rights activist Pauli Murray, who helped craft the legal strategy that animated Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that desegregated schools. Murray, he said, “understood that if we want a diverse, racially diverse democracy, we have to fight for it every day, all the time—and we fight not just with litigation, but with a sense of resilience and resolve and hopefulness.” Turning to the audience, he said, “So, if you leave with anything, leave with a sense of openness.”
