Open letter to my students and anyone else,

I have struggled to find the right words to talk to my students about these chaotic times. This is my attempt to do that. It represents my personal beliefs and not those of my department or others.

As a professor of sustainable development here at App State, this has been a whirlwind of a semester. In the first month, we have seen the federal government slash funding for health research from the National Institutes of Health, start policing the science of scholars through the National Science Foundation, especially related to climate and cut programs to address global health and development. We’ve also seen government decrees that seem to judge who we can be, who is “legitimate” and who deserves help.

I’m sure we all react differently to this. My LinkedIn feed is full of colleagues and friends who have lost their jobs or funding for their work on infectious diseases, climate resilient agriculture, food security and drinking water and sanitation. 

On Friday I read with sadness the slashing of the Epidemiological Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. My first job out of graduate school was a postdoctoral fellowship at the CDC, where I worked alongside an amazing group of new EIS physicians and epidemiologists. 

Unceremoniously firing a group of smart, young professionals who are deeply committed to our national and global health seems like the definition of short-sighted and many other things. Of course, that’s just a small part of the changes.

Over the past two weeks, a couple of things have brought these decrees from above much closer to home for me and our shared efforts in our class. On Feb. 5, the UNC System Board of Governors issued a memo forbidding universities like App State to require courses on diversity, equity and inclusion for graduation. 

The rationale was that requirements like this violate a presidential executive order and that maintaining them could jeopardize billions of dollars in federal funding. This hits home because one of the main courses I teach is SD 2400, Principles of Sustainable Development.

 Some students take it as a requirement for their major, their minor or a general education requirement. I don’t know what makes something a “DEI course,” but we do explore the importance of diversity, justice and stewarding our environment to benefit our communities, our state, region and world. 

No one has told me I’ll have to stop teaching it or teach it a different way, but there is a deafening silence on the enduring value of these ideas. I’ll come back to that. 

The second thing that brought this home was the quiet removal of my department’s Diversity as Justice statement from our website. This was a collective statement of the faculty about our commitment to justice and diversity as things that serve our students and a common good. 

I don’t know why it was removed since no one told us it would happen or has explained why. It was a bit like the quiet erasure of the university’s land acknowledgement statement. I might hypothesize, but don’t know, that this weekend’s quiet removal was done based on the idea that this is required by law or policy, or that it somehow protects us from larger attacks. 

In the most generous hypothesis for why it was taken down over a weekend without notice, it was to avoid drawing attention to us while we keep doing what we think is important. 

For both of these actions, BOG memo on diversity, equity and inclusion courses and the silent removal of our statement of diversity, I’m not going to question the motives of the administrators. However, I do think we need more clear voices in higher education that push back on the underlying logic of these decrees from above and defend why many of us think diversity, equity and inclusion, along with environmental stewardship, protection of rights of all and poverty reduction, are actually in our collective interest. 

Some people seem to be arguing diversity, equity and inclusion is some type of special right. I understand why it would be frustrating for many if you think that way. I think there are many ways to be and feel marginalized in our society — whether by race, class, region, religion, national origin, gender, sexual identity or many more ways. 

We live in a region with a long history of multi-dimensional marginalization. One way to think about this marginalization is through the lens of Amartya Sen’s concepts of human capabilities, which we discussed in class. Marginalizations prevent us from fully developing our individual capabilities and leave us collectively worse off. We are less able to meet our collective needs and to respond to the challenges we face and will face, like Helene and more. Sen also argues we are all better off when we try to address these sources of marginalization through education, health, equality, security and institutional protections. 

I also think it’s important to note some forms of marginalization run much deeper and have persisted for much longer, and they need to be prioritized. And yes, some are embedded in our institutions.

Last week and this week, we have been discussing Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” and Elinor Ostrom’s critique of it, or alternative to it, in SD 2400. These events provide a unique learning moment as we discuss Hardin and Ostrom’s perspectives on how we work together and address shared goals or shared resources. 

Hardin argued people primarily operate out of narrow self-interest when dealing with each other. He called this rational behavior, but I would argue it is usually short-sighted and often irrational. His basic logic is that many problems of shared resources are “zero-sum games,” and we all will act to get as much as we can before someone takes advantage of us. 

In contrast, Ostrom argues under the right conditions, cooperation has the potential for a better outcome. She and others argue when we act like it’s a “zero-sum game,” we actually turn it into a negative sum game. 

Rather than getting our piece of the pie, we make the pie objectively smaller. But Ostrom is anything but naive. She acknowledges some people will always act out their narrow self, “me first,” but then too many of us think cooperation isn’t possible, and we all lose out. Sometimes I think Ostrom is just reminding us of the things we should have learned in kindergarten. 

If the simplest explanation of sustainable development is “meeting our basic needs without undermining the ability of others, including future generations and other countries, to meet theirs,” then the way to do that is by making the pie bigger and enabling all of us to develop our full potential. 

For me, diversity, equity and inclusion has never been about special rights. It’s about being honest about the things that hold people back, seeing that some have more privilege than others and recognizing when some of us lack equitable opportunities we all lose out.

I need to step back and check myself here. I am a straight, white man, with three Ivy League degrees and a good job (hopefully still). I live in a beautiful region and in an eclectic and usually wonderful community. While I didn’t grow up with privilege, as a first generation college student from a lower middle class family, I benefit from it now. I know my kids will benefit from that privilege also, even if they don’t try. While they may benefit from privilege, I think they would benefit more from growing up in a diverse and respectful community, state and country. I think we all would.

This is just my opinion. Feel free to share it.

Dr. Rick Rheingans