As debates over diversity continue to shape North Carolina higher education, Duke University engineering professor Adrian Bejan offers his perspective on the controversial subject in the new book, “Diversity through Freedom.” Bejan examines nature, evolution, and society to challenge assumptions about how to approach diversity in higher education and other institutions.
The book explores the physics of diversity — how diversity happens naturally and why nature opposes efforts of forced diversity. Physics is not about opinion but rather fact, and Bejan uses his background in physics to examine the natural world as it applies to modern diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in higher education.
In an interview with the Carolina Journal, Bejan spoke in detail about his thesis for the book.
“Diversity really means… to divert or to set something aside because it’s different than what you want to keep,” Bejan said. “And I said, wait a minute; let me look at how this thing happens naturally.”
The book is broken into two parts: exploring diversity as a natural phenomenon and from a human perspective, as an unnatural (artificial) diversity. He explores what this second kind of diversity’s impact on society is and what it will look like in the future.
This framing takes the debate away from political commentary and instead focuses on diversity as a physical concept and how the merit system is interwoven into nature’s design.
“The animals have a merit system of their own — the fact that the leopard kills the impala,” Bejan said. “But then that’s just the beginning of the hierarchy system. The hyenas then take their turn and then the vultures. The whole area thrives because of one event, and no one is revolting against the leopard.”
As an example of this, Bejan used a university, which emerges as a natural process of scientists and professors being selected for their merit.
“So, the book begins this way,” said Bejan. “I begin to take a look at the university system and the hierarchy of universities. And I show with the statistics that the rigidity is due to merit, meaning the quality of ideas, which the quality is measured in terms of citations… So the merit system is in play internationally, and it is at odds with the policy on campus.”
Bejan grew up as a basketball player in communist Romania.
“The area of research for which I am known is thermodynamics, which is the science or the physics of power, how to produce power and how to move things with power,” Bejan told CJ.
His interest in physics and thermodynamics began with his own upbringing and time on the basketball court. As he observed players and through his own experience as an athlete, Bejan noticed how natural diversity and merit presented in how animals and humans evolve.
“Everything that you see around is, of course, diverse,” Bejan said.
“Diversity is everywhere,” Bejan wrote. “It screams to be questioned. What is available in plain view and overlooked is not questioned.”
Bejan said that humans are profoundly different in their ideas and that no two humans possess the same mind, perspective, and beliefs.
“We are eminently different from every single one around us,” Bejan said.
This ubiquitous diversity, Bejan said, emerges as the result of freedom operating within nature and society. And this free process of arranging diverse elements by merit in a hierarchy is how nature finds successful solutions to problems.
Bejan emphasized that this is why freer societies continually outperform less free ones, saying, “The future belongs to the free.”
“To move freely does not mean to move alone,” Bejan wrote. “In a free country people organize voluntarily. They come together in hierarchical structures of movement because it is good for their individual freedom, access, life, and staying power.”
Bejab says the process is all around us every day, and allowing it to happen more freely allows merit and successful solutions to rise to the top.
Learn more about the book here.
