Who Will Rid Us of DEI?

Despite recent enthusiasm, the era of DEI is well-entrenched and will not easily be dismantled

I was a diversity hire. My department hired diversity hires.  

DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) was all the rage in university humanities and social sciences departments when I was a graduate student in the 1990s: everything was about gender, race, class, and empire; oppressor and oppressed; white privilege, the male gaze. Over time, the category of class was edged out as gender and sexual identity muscled in.    

On the job market in 1999, I was shortlisted at two universities, both shortlists of all-female candidates. Job advertisements “strongly encouraged” applications from women and visible minorities.

Over the next four years, the department that had hired me hired into four more positions, all heavily influenced by sex and skin color.

“Is it true that there are people in this department who are against equity?” one of the diversity hires asked, scandalized, at a small welcoming party. The clear implication was that anyone who believed in merit-based hiring must be a bigot.

This was already the unchallenged academic mindset.

Our department practiced what was then called equity hiring (a Canadian euphemism for affirmative action). I was told that equity hiring meant that whenever two or more job candidates were equally qualified, the candidate should be chosen whose hiring would make the department more diverse.

The idea is nonsense: no two candidates are ever truly equal.

Once the decision is made to prioritize diversity, that quickly becomes the only urgent criterion. White men’s applications—hundreds of them—simply went into the reject pile; most were barely even read.

Whether the diversity candidates were as good as the white men didn’t actually matter. No serious arguments were made about quality. It was always possible to defend a diversity applicant, to explain why a single article in a marginal journal was not only equivalent to but actually better than an award-winning book.

“It’s true that Candidate XY’s book on Shakespeare is notable,” a pro-diversity department member would say, “but I think our students will benefit more from Candidate XX’s cutting-edge work on woman travelers of the Elizabethan age. XX’s work is still in the preliminary stages [i.e. not published yet, perhaps not even written yet] but it will make a substantial contribution to our course offerings.”

Even glaring weaknesses, such as a paucity of demonstrated achievement, could be spun into a strength. “I like that Candidate XX is working in a non-traditional area, and I respect that she is not trying to publish too much too fast.”

Merit itself quickly became a loaded word, what would now be deemed a right-wing dog whistle. It meant you hadn’t critically interrogated systemic inequalities and didn’t care about correcting centuries of injustice.

Some of the diversity champions in my department were true-believers who bullied others through the force of their fanatical righteousness, believing that diversity was the only cause worth fighting for. Others were careerists using DEI as a route to power. Many were go-along-to-get-along types who didn’t care much either way. Almost no one publicly dissented (I did, to little effect).

Since that time 20 years ago, commitment to DEI has increased. By 2018, a colleague of mine could look around the table at a department meeting and shake his head: “Let’s face it. This department is too white.” There was not a single guffaw.

**

In the wake of Claudine Gay’s forced resignation from her position as President of Harvard University earlier this month, critics of DEI have expressed hope and even confidence that its end in the academy is approaching. Writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, Paul Schwennesen (“Is DEI Collapsing?”) described the climate of censorship, tension, outright discrimination, and thought control in his PhD program, and stated that “for the first time in recent memory, the hyper-politicized woke orthodoxy is being successfully challenged.” “Maybe,” he wrote, “the lunacy is coming to an end.”

Maybe, but almost certainly not.

Billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard graduate Bill Ackman, in a long post on X following Gay’s ousting, alleged that “Today was an important step forward for the University,” and asserted that “Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form.” (More on Ackman’s definition of diversity below.)

Substack author Bad Cattitude predicted that “the real fun is about to begin” (“Auditing Academia: What Have the Professors Been Professing?”) as the masses discover what’s been going on in academia. At last, he alleged, those “obscure journals and dissertations, previously read only by other like-minded members of the club who cared about nothing save ideological purity are going to be read widely,” with the result that “propensity for plagiarism will be the least of the revelations.” He provided a few examples of the manically anti-white and anti-male allegations that have passed as scholarship for decades.

But therein lies part of the problem. The attacks on whiteness and maleness have been a central part of academia for decades, at least since Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which insisted that white people, and white men in particular, must acknowledge and make restitution for the allegedly “unearned” comforts of their white lives. The diversity mantra has been promoted in theory (intersectional feminism and critical race ideology) and in practice (DEI admissions, scholarships, hiring, promotion, and accolades). It is now making its troubling presence known in, for example, the military and the aviation industry. How it can be stopped or even fully understood is not at all apparent.

Who is going to expose the academic rot? Notoriously jargon-laden and abstruse, academic writings require serious time and effort (not to mention intestinal fortitude) that most normal people, with jobs and families and busy lives, don’t have to invest. These normal people will need to rely on the few academic dissidents willing and able to be informers. There have already been plenty of these, cogent and compelling, but unable to level anything near a knockout blow: one thinks immediately of the brilliant and funny Sokal hoax-style work of Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, as well as Pluckrose and Lindsay’s Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity (2020).

And they were far from the first. As long ago as 1987 (in The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students), Allan Bloom told the sorry saga of how academic administrators and craven professors sold out liberal education to violent black students in the late 1960s in exchange for ease and status (for an explanation of events at Cornell during Bloom’s tenure, see Paul Rahe’s eye-opening essay in Public Discourse). According to Bloom, humanities academics were the first to lose faith in their disciplines, which came to seem far less important than social goals such as smashing the patriarchy or combating racism. The moment these social goals were embraced, commitment to intellectual excellence became, at best, a secondary consideration.

Bloom’s bracing analysis was confirmed and amplified tenfold over the ensuing decades in books such as Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990), David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2007), and Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (2013), all of which quoted copiously from radical professors to show how impartial, evidence-based scholarship had been openly abandoned in favor of ideological advocacy. There is now a mini-industry in books about universities as centers of higher indoctrination.

Hands were wrung, the corruption was investigated, but nothing was done. Bloom and many others were promptly dismissed as hidebound reactionaries, regressive and hateful, just as present-day critics of the academy are routinely dismissed (for a pungent example of asinine straw-manning, see Moira Donegan’s Guardian article, in which she claims that the Claudine Gay affair had nothing to do with Gay’s inadequacy, everything to do with “the right wing’s assault on education.”)

A few more raised voices, even with a lot of money behind them, do not a revolution make.

The difficulty of purging DEI can be traced to various causes, one of the most significant being DEI’s many warm and half-warm adherents, especially at the administrative level (all those diversity deans and HR personnel) but certainly not only there. For many academics, the diversity mission is the ground of their identity. At least two generations of academics have built their careers on diversity-focused research, which has fully permeated their teaching and scholarship. They are not going to give it up without a to-the-death fight.

They’re not even honest about what they’ve been doing over the last three or four decades of social engineering (for a definitive chronicling of how equity invaded every aspect of public life in Canada, see Martin Loney’s The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada [1998]; for a more recent analysis of the American experience, see Heather Mac Donald’s The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture [2018]). In a recent article by CBS News about Bill Ackman’s crusade, high-powered diversity advocate Jarvis Sam, former diversity head at Nike, claimed that diversity has never been intended to discriminate against anyone. All the special scholarships, the targeted hirings and promotions, the women’s only positions, the exclusionary language and ideological forcing have all been a misunderstanding, it seems. “The addition of diversity criteria is not meant to exclude or disadvantage non-minorities,” he reassured the public; it has merely sought to correct the conditions through which “talent from some backgrounds and experiences aren’t given a fair shake to apply and engage in the competitive process for opportunities.”

Yes, that was just the sort of thing my colleagues used to say as they went about turning away white male applicants en masse.

Is it possible to change academic culture? Academics have a deep-rooted disdain for non-academics, whom academics tend to see as less intelligent and, especially, less morally refined than they. Their contempt for Ackman, for Elon Musk, or for any perceived right-wingers is bottomless. They will certainly not take kindly to Ackman’s proposal that business people be brought into Harvard to help right the academic ship. And even if anti-DEI directives were to be issued by reformist university administrations or a bold Department of Education, it is likely that many academics would (quietly or loudly) flout them.

But the real problem may go even deeper. The anti-intellectual moral imperatives of the ‘60s are still with us, so deeply imbedded in our reflex egalitarianism as to make us quail at the task before us.

Such difficulties are glaringly evident in Bill Ackman’s own arguments, in which despite a take-no-prisoners salvo, he can’t help but frequently profess his pro-diversity bona fides, which lead him into various self-contradictions and ideological concessions that spell doom for his declared project. He states near the beginning of his jeremiad that “I have always believed that diversity is an import feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.”

The statement is essentially indistinguishable from any by even the most strident DEI advocate; it gives the game away before the attack has properly begun (and it rather glaringly fails to explain the mathematical, scientific, medical, AI, and technological successes of non-diverse teams in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea—not to mention earlier iterations of American enterprise itself).  

Ackman’s confusion on this score is evident throughout his diatribe, in which he tells us, for example, that “I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand,” not seeming to realize, even at this point in the rollout of DEI, that thinking of people as group members is the fundamental problem of a pernicious framework. At another point, he announces that he was at first delighted to hear about Gay’s appointment (“When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community”)—because every decent-hearted person, it appears, must feel a great gush of pleasure at the thought of a black woman’s promotion (and not at the thought of a white man’s).

Later on, Ackman bolsters his argument about DEI’s discrimination against white men by (conveniently) summoning the specter of white men’s racism. “An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less,” he quips, explaining that it “generates resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.” Ackman is so thoroughly marinated in anti-white thinking that he must object to discrimination against white men by summoning a racist bogeyman. Pre-emptively libeling white men for justified resentment and anger is a great way to guarantee the continued life of DEI.

This is the true measure of DEI’s success, that even a man allegedly going scorched earth on a despicable ideology reveals his weddedness to the ideology. Ackman’s sense of himself as a good person is so deeply bound up with DEI as to disable him from anything more than tinkering around the edges of its policies. I suspect he, and most others, will not be able to stomach the disparities that will result if merit is ever allowed to regain its paramount place in academia.

And this is the only possible solution, at once simple and monumentally difficult, for all taxpayer-supported colleges. All disciplines must be radically de-politicized in word and deed. If sex is too dangerous for professors and students, then political indoctrination and ideological harassment are far worse. They are being forced on millions of students without their consent or even, at times, their full awareness, by those whose mission it is to help form their minds. Professors should profess their academic specializations, not berate classes and the world on the evils of Trump or of trans oppression. There is plenty of room elsewhere in the public square for polemics and advocacy. The academy and all employed in it should be a world apart.

A massive decontamination must be undertaken. Programs in the hard sciences, mathematics, medicine, and engineering must be preserved from the already-advancing rot of DEI. All other programs, already captured, must be reformed or abolished. Advocacy should be banned from higher education, both in the classroom and on campus generally. No more Israeli Apartheid Week, no more Masculinity Confession Booth, no more Anti-Abortion Campaigns. No more Take Back the Night, consent workshops, or anti-racism training sessions. The pursuit of knowledge, rigorous and dispassionate, detached from the passions and causes of the day, should be the university’s only goal.

What about free speech? What about healthy debate? That hasn’t been happening on college campuses for many decades, and is not about to start now. Campuses should be reserved for the pursuit of excellence, for the transmission of the western inheritance, and for the hard work of training students to become accomplished in writing, logic, and research. Naturally, political issues will and can’t help but be discussed, but they must be approached in a determinedly non-partisan manner. As Allan Bloom described the ideal, “Socrates thought it more important to discuss justice, to try to know what it is, than to engage himself in implementing whatever partial perspective on it happened to be exciting the passions of the day” (The Closing of the American Mind, p. 317). This spirit must be brought back to education.

But who would do this, how, and under what authority, I can’t formulate for the reasons mentioned above. There is no political will and no clear path to reform. Very few even understand how deep the problem goes. At best, we can hope for “small flares of intellectual light” (private colleges, online courses, gatherings of truth-seekers) amidst the barbarism.

DEI will eventually collapse under the weight of its tawdry, malevolent lies. But it is not likely to be the triumphant rout now predicted.