“Let People Be Free to Come Up with Ideas”

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | May 15, 2026 | Jenna A. Robinson

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Diversity, equity, and inclusion have gotten a lot of attention over the past decade. In these pages, we’ve often lamented that universities’ focus on superficial measures of diversity undermines merit and overlooks viewpoint diversity.

A new book by Duke professor Adrian Bejan, Diversity Through Freedom, emphasizes a different kind of diversity: the organic, inevitable, and beneficial diversity found in nature. He calls it “a phenomenon that has a mind of its own” that can’t be “shoehorned into a few distinct (antagonistic) classes.”

The Martin Center sat down with Professor Bejan to discuss his book and its implications for higher education. This transcription has been edited for clarity and length.

Martin Center: Let me start by asking you about the core argument of your book. You say diversity comes from freedom, not from top-down efforts to engineer it. What does that mean in plain terms, especially for universities?

Bejan: To let people be free to come up with ideas and gather voluntarily around ideas that are better. And then if you want to admire the association, you’ll be admiring natural diversity. The engineered diversity is not to be confused with the natural diversity. Engineered diversity is something that is a very old practice in human society. It goes by many names. The most common is the class struggle in which the different things are two: oppressed versus oppressor or proletarian versus factory worker, or underrepresented and overrepresented, minority versus majority. It’s always two antagonistic groups. And yes, if you want to make a mixture of, for example, milk and coffee, you would go for mixing two things. But nature has a mind of its own. It’s basically the constant evolving movie of anything goes. And amazingly, the diversity that happens naturally is impossible to measure.

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TOPICS: Books/Literature; Education; Science
KEYWORDS: academia; bookreview; college; diversity