Public debates over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at university campuses has tended to focus on the question of fairness: is it fair for some groups of people to have unique advantages in the university application process? Is it fair for some groups of students to have university resources allocated to support their learning? It’s understandablethat the debate so often takes on a tone of moral righteousness and justice seeking. After all, what we now call DEI was originally a series of educational policies meant to mitigate long-standing forms of inequality or unfairness in various aspects of university education, including the limited admissions opportunities for racial minorities and women and the prevalence of sexist practices that diminished women’s ability to take full advantage of their schooling.

In my conversation with Cindy Cheng and Paisley Currah, wedeliberately reframe the debate over DEI from a question of fairness—"Why should this or that group get something I don’t?”—to a problem of access—"How do we get as many students, and as many kinds of them, as possible to benefitfrom higher education?” At its best, DEI aims to expand access to schooling for a broader population of potential students, including first-generation college-goers, poor and working class people, racial minorities and women. As our guests remind us, the first Americans to benefit from DEI initiatives were predominantly white, poor farmers and rural factory workers in the early twentieth century, and after World War II, mostly male military veterans who received government stipends to pay for down payments on suburban homes and college tuition through the GI Bill.

Considering that so many Americans of every demographicbackground have benefitted from these various policies, we ask why today’s version of DEI—including holistic admissions, protections for the university’s most vulnerable student populations, and grants or fellowship to support low-income students—has become so intensely partisan and narrowly focused on the question of race. We conclude that the politicization of DEI and its reduction to the percieved unfairness of so-called race-based admissions (or affirmativeaction) hides a more fundamental problem: that university education is simply too expensive and unattainable for most Americans regardless of their background or cultural identity. Access, we argue, should be king: this might look like significantly lower tuitions, more public investment in university infrastructure, less students debt, and the elimination of food and housing insecurity for all students. If this were to happen, universities would genuinely follow through on their promise to help generations of Americans from all walks of life achieve meaningful and sustainable upward mobility—and that would really be fair.