DEI Is Evil and it's About Time For It to Go Away
America's Universities are Breeding a Generation of Hatemongers in the Name of "Racial Justice."
The one thing that all totalitarian movements have in common is that they ban free speech. Hitler did it. Stalin did it. Mao did it. So did Mussolini, Franco, Castro…
I could go on. When a society decides that there can be no criticism of a movement and that all must profess loyalty to it you know you’re in trouble. That’s why I get nervous when I see the current obsession with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion I start to get nervous. It’s not the movement itself that worries me; it’s the fact that the left thinks it can force everyone else to believe as they do. Don’t believe me? Ask Randall L Kennedy, the Michael R Klein Professor at Harvard Law School.
On a posting for a position as an assistant professor in international and comparative education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants are required to submit a CV, a cover letter, a research statement, three letters of reference, three or more writing samples, and a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”
At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.”
By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.
For the record, Kennedy is a lot nicer about it than I would be. What he’s describing is blatant speech control. This is Harvard and other universities making it known that they will not hire anyone who does not toe the line. It’s DEI uber alles. Don’t be shocked. That’s how it happened.
Scholars who were Jewish or supported left-leaning parties struggled to find research and teaching positions in public, government-supported German universities and often worked in private ones instead. With the passage of the new law, the Nazis attempted to root out any dissent to their policies and ideology that remained in German higher education.
Peter Drucker, an Austrian economist, was then a lecturer at Frankfurt University. Fearful of Hitler’s plans for Germany, he was prepared to leave the country but hoped that it would not be necessary to do so. The first Nazi-led faculty meeting at the university convinced him otherwise.
So, yes, once again America’s liberals are turning to their idelogical forebears and using similar methods. By forcing all professors to submit DEI statements, universities are making their expectations clear: All professors must submit to the DEI movement. All faculty must teach the accepted racial propaganda.
Learning had to follow the party line in the Soviet Union as well.
The official philosophy of science of the Soviet Union was dialectical materialism. In heated moments Soviet philosophers would argue whether cutting-edge scientific theories—relativity or quantum mechanics in physics, say, or resonance theory in chemistry—were compatible with the tenets of Lenin or Friedrich Engels. (Marx had comparatively little to say about such matters.) If a doctrine was found wanting—as happened with Freudian psychoanalysis in the face of Pavlov-inspired behaviorism—it was tragically suppressed, and its adherents occasionally brutally repressed. More frequently than not the demonized doctrines found champions who succeeded in averting the cudgel.
Then there was genetics—the most extreme ideological showdown in Soviet science, which set the terms for a dispute that would reverberate for decades. In 1928 a Ukrainian-born agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, began publicizing experiments concerning a process he called “vernalization.” Seeds were treated with exposure to cold or friction, and the plants that sprouted from them ostensibly displayed greater resistance to the hardships of the climate. At the same moment when Joseph Stalin had imposed collectivized agriculture on the Soviet countryside and famine was afoot, the promise of an agronomic panacea from a Soviet-educated child of peasants made the higher-ups take notice. Even the geneticists—the Soviet Union, alongside the United States, was a leading country in promoting the experimental study of Mendelian inheritance—were willing to hear this agronomist out.
Lysenko soon partnered with some philosophers and began to reframe his theory in more ambitious terms. No longer was it just a set of practical techniques to improve crop yields; now Lysenko argued that the reason vernalization worked—in itself a contentious issue, since the evidence for its efficacy was rather thin—was because the stresses “shattered” the heredity of the seed, making it amenable to reformatting under environmental influences. Lysenko sold his theories as the only correct dialectical-materialist understanding of heredity, one based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics rather than Gregor Mendel’s particles of heredity (known since 1905 as “genes”).
So yes, this is how totalitarian movements work. Nazi Germany forced its universities to conform. In the Soviet Union, Lysenko used Marxist theory to keep others from arguing with him about genetics, and in the United States, you have to prove your loyalty to DEI to get a job in academia.
And this is nothing new. In his 2015 article Edward Schlosser had this to say:
I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We’ve seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on.
I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.
I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that’s considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.
And why does this happen?
This shift in student-teacher dynamic placed many of the traditional goals of higher education — such as having students challenge their beliefs — off limits. While I used to pride myself on getting students to question themselves and engage with difficult concepts and texts, I now hesitate. What if this hurts my evaluations and I don’t get tenure? How many complaints will it take before chairs and administrators begin to worry that I’m not giving our customers — er, students, pardon me — the positive experience they’re paying for? Ten? Half a dozen? Two or three?
This phenomenon has been widely discussed as of late, mostly as a means of deriding political, economic, or cultural forces writers don’t much care for. Commentators on the left and right have recently criticized the sensitivity and paranoia of today’s college students. They worry about the stifling of free speech, the implementation of unenforceable conduct codes, and a general hostility against opinions and viewpoints that could cause students so much as a hint of discomfort.
IT’S NOT JUST THAT STUDENTS REFUSE TO COUNTENANCE UNCOMFORTABLE IDEAS — THEY REFUSE TO ENGAGE THEM, PERIOD.
I agree with some of these analyses more than others, but they all tend to be too simplistic. The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.
This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics, a discourse that “is focused much more on taxonomy than politics [which] emphasizes the names by which we should call some strains of inequality [ ... ] over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them.” Under such a conception, people become more concerned with signaling goodness, usually through semantics and empty gestures, than with actually working to effect change.
It’s interesting to note that Oliver Schindler often paid lip service to the Nazi Party in public while working behind the scenes to save the lives of Jews. Is he a hero because he save literally hundreds of lives? Or is he a villain because he said something racist? I’m afraid I know what the average liberal’s answer would be and it wouldn’t be one I agree with.
It’s obvious what’s going on here and what’s going to happen if we don’t put a stop to it, by force if necessary. If you value your right to think and speak for yourself it’s time to put these people in their places. They can believe what they believe. They can teach what they want to teach. They have no right to force those who disagree with them to believe and teach as they do. America’s schools were never meant to be the Wokist version of the Hitler Youth. Yet that’s what they’ve become. It’s time to take back our schools, from kindergarten to post doctoral work. Now.
"Didn't Earn It" -- time to stop the leeches.