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How DEI Corrupts America’s
Universities
The ideology of
“diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not what it purports to be.
The idea of public universities in the United States
originally rested on a compact between the citizen and the republic. The
agreement was that the citizen would provide funding for the university in
order to train young people to advance the public interest and the common
good. In recent years, however, this compact has shattered, and
considerable efforts will be needed to rebuild it.”
My response: Like hesitant Rufo critic, Jordan Peterson,
recently suggested, it is concerning that conservatives activists like Rufo
are politically inserting themselves in the process of running
universities, a needed correction to offset the corrupt, ideological
excesses of DEI promoted there by staff and professors; Peterson worries
that right-wing ideologues running campuses with intellectual purity tests
would be no improvement on left-wing ideologues currently terrorizing and
suppressing intellectual dissidents at campuses across America.
Rufo, denies this criticism because he claims conservatives
becoming regents and curbing woke ideological tyranny on campus will not go
overboard, because they want balance in views, not control and conformity,
and I believe Rufo.
Second, Rufo does seem to offer a historical basis for the
idea that public universities here originally rested on a compact between
the citizen and the republic. The citizens fund the universities so colleges
and professors will train the young, and this advanced the public interest
and the common good. Rufo is angry that Leftist postmodernists have
shattered this compact, and considerable efforts are necessary to rebuild
it.
I think Rufo should be unleashed to show what he can do to
improve a university, and I have not forgotten Peterson’s warning.
I would offer my solution that if each 18 year-old is an
individuating supercitizen on the way and in training to assume her adult
role, no professor, no ideologue, no institution will be strong enough or
cruel enough to make her submit to their brainwashing and mind control. Her
powerful original thinking, her force of personality, and her indomitable
courage will render it impossible to force her to sumbit to their threats
and bullying. This is the best corrective prevention to any institutional
attempt anywhere—including colleges-to tyrannize and mind-control the
students or the young, the favorite target for ambitious authoritarians.
Rufo: “The clearest expression of what has gone wrong is
DEI. At first glance, a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”
might seem laudable. But DEI employs a propagandistic language to conceal
its real intentions. It is, in fact, the opposite of what it appears to be.”
My response: DEI is propagandistic language pushed by
postmodernist true believers to capture and control all free young people
at college.
Rufo: “We can review the acronym in parts. First,
“diversity.” The initial connotation of the word suggests a variety of
people, experiences, and knowledge. But in practice, universities use
diversity to justify a policy of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit,
racial discrimination: a total inversion of the principles of colorblind
equality and individual merit.”
My response: Diversity for Progressives means monolithic
sameness of viewpoint, and there are no individuals: their policy of
reverse discrimination inverts the principles of colorblind equality and
individual merit, as all people are avatars of their intersectionally
assigned group memberships, favoring some groups and putting down other
groups: these are cruel people with evil intentions towards those
disfavored by them.
Rufo: “Second, “inclusion.” In kindergarten, teaching
kids to be inclusive means encouraging them to share and be polite to
classmates. But in the context of a university, inclusion is used as
justification for excluding people and ideas that are seen as a threat to
prevailing ideologies and sentiments.”
My response: For Leftists inclusion does not mean inclusion:
it means radical excluding of people, ideas and disfavored group members
viewed as antithetical to the prevailing ideology and sentiment of
Leftists.
Rufo: “Finally, “equity.” The immediate association is with
the principle of equality. But equity is actually a radically opposed idea.
Equality is the principle that every man or woman should be judged as an
individual, neither punished nor rewarded based on ancestry. Equity demands
the opposite: categorizing individuals into group identities and assigning
disparate treatment to members of those groups, seeking to “equalize” what
would otherwise be considered unjust outcomes.
What this means in practice is that members of certain
groups get favored, others disfavored: in short, inequality justified under
the ideology of “equity.” “
My response: I cannot improve on his definition of equity.
Postmodernist Marxist equity is actually pure inequity, pure inequality,
pure injustice visited upon disfavored groups like males, whites,
Christians, Jews, conservatives, individualists, Americans, capitalists and
heterosexuals, by those now running the institution and their favored
groups elevated above the disfavored groups, a naked display of reverse
discrimination unfolding.
Rufo: “You see this hiding in plain sight. Universities
publish in their own materials prima facie evidence of their
commitments to racial discrimination, quotas, and disparate treatment on
the basis of identity in hiring, admissions, promotions, and in other
programs.
Administrators, who are supposed to administer services and
manage programs neutrally, use DEI ideology to impose political criteria on
the speech and behavior of faculty, students, and staff. They subordinate
the pursuit of truth, which should be a university’s highest commitment, to
the dogmas of ideological activism.”
My response: Again, Rufo incomparably and simply reveals how
DEI ideology in practice is the imposition of totalitarian practices,
employed in Red China or in modern Russia, upon once open, free liberal
arts colleges. DEI advocates have critically and perhaps irreversibly
damaged our universities. Rufo’s modest but powerful of reasonable public
retaking of that university in Florida is critically needed, despite Jordan
Peterson’s worries of Rufo and his ilk going to far.
Rufo: “To give an example of how DEI is actually practiced,
consider the following training materials from University of Colorado
Boulder’s DEI program.
The basic predicate of CU Boulder’s DEI program is that
“Black, Indigenous and People of Color,” or “BIPOC,” students are failing
because of “white supremacy culture.”
What is white supremacy culture? According to CU Boulder’s
DEI documentation, it includes “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “a sense
of urgency,” “worship of the written word,” and “objectivity.” These traits
are supposedly vestiges of “whiteness” and unavailable to racial
minorities—an unintentionally bigoted attitude.
Next, CU Boulder’s DEI bureaucrats would have you engage in
a 21-day “Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge.”
One of the resources included in this program is a guide on
“How to Be a Better White Person.” The document supplied a protocol on how
to accomplish this task. Step one: “Realize you’re white.” Step two:
“Recognize your privilege.” Step three: “Know things.” Finally, from a
related resource, instructions on how to be an “ally” to racial minorities:
“Transfer the benefits of your privilege to those who lack it”; “amplify
the voices of the oppressed before your own”; “acknowledge that, even
though you feel pain, the conversation is not about you.”
This is not the language of an academic program but of an
abusive relationship.”
My response: These cultural Marxist fanatics are sick,
vicious, and could lead to murderous persecution of targeted groups. Pol
Pot would have been proud of their attempts.
Rufo: “Unfortunately, the language of DEI has also taken
hold in CU Boulder’s curriculum. For example, the university has recently
included a course on “Critical Whiteness Studies.” The syllabus is replete
with activist terms, such as “institutionalized whiteness,” “white
privilege,” and “white fragility.” The basic concept is that “whiteness” is
an irreducibly malicious essence, loaded with ancestral guilt.
Human history is brutal and filled with injustice. But to
scapegoat one population group, European whites, as the essence of evil is
nothing but propaganda. Obviously, none of this meets any genuine scholarly
standards—and that’s a pattern characteristic of DEI.”
My response: To scapegoat onto European whites is to make us
the new Jews, and these lying blood liberlists will put whites in chains
and mark them for death camps in 2077 (if they go forward unchecked) like
the Nazis did to Jews in the 30s and 40s.
Rufo: “Finally, DEI is used as a justification to hire
scholars of favored demographics and ideologies. CU Boulder has explicit
and implicit racial quotas in hiring, which, in theory, violate the law.
According to one professor, more than 90 percent of recent hires at CU
Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences have been diversity hires. Of the
remaining 10 percent, some might lay claim to other protected identities,
such as “LGBTQ,” reducing the percentage of “oppressors” even further.
This is unethical and immoral. But under DEI, it is a
requirement of social justice.
The problem with DEI is not merely administrative or
curricular. When its principles are adopted wholesale, DEI compromises the
fundamental purpose of the university and the basic compact between the
citizen and the state.
In fact, the degeneration of universities into centers of
ideological activism—which American taxpayers are currently
subsidizing—violates basic democratic principle to such an extraordinary
degree that we urgently need to implement dramatic reforms.”
My response: I am pleased that Rufo understands the problem and
how to make it better.
Rufo: “Fortunately, this is now beginning to happen. We have
already abolished or curtailed DEI bureaucracies in 12 states. In Florida,
where I have worked on the reform campaign, Governor Ron DeSantis has not
only abolished DEI but also enacted reforms to faculty hiring, university
governance, and the core curriculum.
The vision for these reforms is simple: to prioritize merit
over ancestry, and to govern by the principle of colorblind equality,
rather than left-wing racialism. The university should judge everyone as an
individual, rather than as avatars of the “oppressor” and the “oppressed.” “
My response: One is not civilized, moral or just unless one
judges everyone as individuals, based in their merited treatment under the
umbrella of colorblind equality. Each person is a sovereign individual, and
no more must group identity allow people to be mendaciously reduced to
being group representatives as groupists, belonging to condemned, attacked
oppressor groups, against the favored, elevated oppressed groups, now the
new elite, now granted special privileges, to made permanent.
Rufo: “And, most of all, the university should be oriented
toward truth. In the coming years, state leaders will have to choose: to
prioritize the pursuit of knowledge, or to prioritize racial activism.
We can encourage genuine diversity—a range of opinion, from
a variety of people—but universities under DEI have demonstrated, time and
again, a basic hostility to scholarly standards and fair conduct.
America’s universities have been a boon to our society. They
deserve public support. But only if the universities meet their end of the
bargain.
Abolish DEI. Restore merit. And let the universities pursue
their true mission, without ideological interference.
That is what we are working toward. And we will win.
Christopher F.
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This
article was originally published in City Journal. “
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