Who is going to expose the academic rot?" You, Janice are doing a stellar job of it, but the minds of students have been disabled before the end of high school. I just listen to my grandchildren who receive sound wisdom at home but come home from school and say things that demonstrate the power of indoctrination and peer power over sound parenting. However, this not new. I think my grandchildren will pull through, but only because their parents are fully engaged. Sadly, they are a tiny minority.
DEI is a trojan horse, first and foremost because the United States IS diverse. So what's the push to make "diverse" what already IS diverse?
I'm tail end of the baby boom and even when growing up in a suburb of Chicago, there were "diverse" people in our milieu that represented their overall percentage of the population. They were NOT "marginalized" either, unless you consider making two black students our Prom King and Queen a form of "marginalization."
I have numerous anecdotes on various DEI blunders that I've witnessed over the years, fodder for my Substack. Here's a piece that infers why no one told Claudine Gay to get rid of the plagiarism before she submitted her dissertation:
Another "offensive" story involves the diverse restaurant where I served pizza in the 80s, which traded its Mexican busboys for black kids from the Projects, with disastrous results. It's actually quite funny -- they practically paid the Mexicans' airfare to return after the black kids from the Projects debacle.
It's unfortunate, because I believe we all want to see people succeed, but the crux of DEI is to let some people get by with piss poor performance, in all too many cases, which isn't helpful to the "diverse" in any way, shape, or form. It merely teaches them that mediocrity is good enough, that skin color is merit enough, which perpetuates a true inability to compete.
Janice, unfortunately I share your bleak prognosis. DEI is deeply entrenched, far more dearly loved by most academics than the abstract principles of merit and objectivity that guided universities since the Enlightenment. This is because DEI becomes a personal mission, providing existential life meaning for its adherents. I foresee no possibility of large scale repudiation of DEI until its lies and inconsistencies lead to massive social consequences that can no longer be hid. By that time, it is an open question whether anything of our heritage will remain to be saved.
Another 10-star analysis by the esteemed Janice F. Her skepticism about the predicted end of DEI is solidly grounded in an unsurpassed understanding of the academic mindset.
I think DEI will destroy itself. It doesn't need helped along.
By its nature diversity as a focus creates the conditions for its own downfall. Claudine Gay is a case in point. Aside from the plagiarism, she was by any measure a total nonentity, someone who shouldn't even be at a community college never mind a leading university. When you remove competency as a factor, as diversity hiring always does, other factors come in to play. Different kinds of people get on. Gay quite literally wouldn't have been there had she not been black. She represents failure of diversity, and a very visible one.
So the diversity hires themselves, like Claudine Gay, will act as the poster children for the whole debacle. The university professors can cling to it all they like but most of the world looks at them like the morons they clearly are, being left behind by the competent and the able. The world laughs as the West lets the lunatics destroy the asylum.
Turning up the flame of DEI until it consumes itself is the only solution I can foresee. Let’s encourage their every bad idea and call for, no, demand, an even more diverse hiring agenda. Intellectual Diversity hasn’t been properly addressed. The entire bell curve must be proportionally represented! Perhaps bad ideas need to be let to run their course. Like you said, the private universities and online courses can take on the mantle of actual education. Let the Marxist DEI extremists spiral into interracial chaos while serious people get on with building a functioning society.
While “purging DEI” may indeed be daunting and distant, that still may be the easy part, because once the diversity crowd has been shown the door, whom do you replace them with?
This project has been going full steam for, as Janice says, at least two generations, really a full adult human lifetime or more. It’s not like there are masses of well-trained scholars out there working other jobs or in cryosleep pods that we can just slide into place once sanity returns.
Intellectual continuity going back centuries has been severed. There’s no manual on how to fix this, and the situation continues to worsen every year as legitimate scholarship fades further from living memory.
While DEI has certainly hurt the hard sciences and retarded their progress, I think they can recover. But how to restore a university history department, when there are no longer real historians? – same question for art history, English, sociology.
I know it’s not as black and white as that, but I don’t think people appreciate how deep the hole we’ve dug, and are still digging, is.
Sadly, I fear Janice is right about the staying power of DEI. The reality is that the idea of judging people by group membership is very ancient and persists despite the bloodshed of the US Civil War and the wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Dream of a colorblind society. The reason the Democrat party fell so naturally into this way of thinking is that it was the core that allowed their believe in slavery and Jim Crow to exist. Their dominance in the academic system has doomed academia to be on the wrong side of history as surely as if it was flying the confederate battle flag from every campus. I saw this within my own heavily academic family with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. These good liberal Democrats were practically having a religious experience at the election of a black president, as if it somehow had absolved them of all the sins they perceived they had been carrying. My response that Obama was not the first black candidate I voted for for president and that I had NOT voted for him because his racist ideology and policies were contrary to achieving Dr. King's Dream, was incomprehensible to them. Unlike most of these folks, I had grown up in a biracial and multicultural family and had long discarded the liberal white guilt that the rest of my family desperately sought divine intervention to relieve. Watching them it finally occurred to me that none of them is really about equality or achieving Dr. King's Dream. It's about feeling good about themselves and absolution from their perceived sins. This is why virtue signaling is so important to them...even if it comes at the expense of actually achieving something concrete on the issue in question.
So how does academia recover? Sadly, I think the whole thing may need to burn to the ground and be fully replaced with new institutions with entirely new employees. Certainly there are a small number of competent academics who have stood true to the mission of academia who could be brought into new institutions. The majority, however, are either too tainted to be salvaged or have demonstrated they are too self absorbed, self motivated or just too timid to be given any sort of position in the reformed/new institutions. A big way to accelerate this transition would be to completely defund academia due to its legacy of DEI hiring. That means no more federal or state funds for campuses, loans/financial aid for students or research grants. Reserve those resources fro the new institutions which would have to be built from entirely new hires. Thoughts?
I am now reading “Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World” by the great Serbian economist Branko Milanović. In it Milanović distinguishes between what he calls Liberal meritocratic capitalism, which he argues has prevailed in the US and Western Europe in the early 21st century and what he calls political capitalism, of which the People’s Republic of China is the best example, but would also include such diverse countries as Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Algeria and Tanzania. His book was published in September 2019, so it was a little surprising that even at that time he makes not a single reference to DEI, and can use the word “meritocratic” to describe North American capitalism in the 21st century without snickering. The political capitalist regimes he contrasts the US with all tend to be more corrupt than the United States and less democratic, but I suspect none of them have been contaminated by DEI in the same way or to the same extent as the US. This is perhaps part of the reason that they have, with the exception of Algeria, shown impressive growth rates in average GDP per capita between 1990/1991 and 2016, Of course, most people probably wouldn’t prefer to move to any of these countries rather than live in the US or Canada, although even this is now a matter for debate. Brock Eldon’s novella “Ground Zero in the Culture War” describes his frustration completing a Master’s degree in literature at a major Canadian university, and how he found happiness in Vietnam, a political capitalist country where DEI has not contaminated the society. Good luck to him, his lovely Vietnamese wife and their young daughter.
A second comment: I appreciate your admission that YOU yourself were a Diversity Hire. Affirmative Action-ish kinds of programs def started in the 1980s. I recall when I graduated from McGill in 1988 looking at the jobs board, where companies would advertise jobs for new engineering grads, most of the major companies explicitly stated they were hiring young women only, which meant every girl in the programs (maybe 5-20% depending on the discipline) had automatic jobs. In some sense, this may have worked against them, as when you make life too easy for someone, its dulls their abilities. Those of us who had to work hard to get jobs actually obliquely benefited, as it made us great job searchers, which actually has helped many of us for our entire careers.
A tremendous essay, Janice. Getting rid of DEI will take a while, if indeed anybody who could make that happen really wants to get rid of it. When I was looking for academic jobs in the late 70s and 80s I often heard "we had to hire a woman," a DEI refrain before DEI itself. If there is any hope, I would see it in the general decline of the college-university complex, which long ago dropped the serious business of teaching people to think and analyze and articulate. As colleges shrink, so will the influence of the professoriate. Socratic teaching was too adversarial for the profs, especially for women and feminist men. It was unacceptable to see one view as better or worse than another. Somebody's feelings might be hurt! As this rot set in, higher education swelled its administration and increasingly relied in evaluation-sensitive part-time teachers. College became very expensive. At the same time, its effectiveness was diluted. Then people discovered that in a good job market a degree was not needed, and that in a poor one it was little help. The business world saw the uselessness of higher ed and set up their own training programs. The ed market has slowly been getting the message. In the future, one can hope, there will be fewer profs and academic administrators telling the world what to think and do. No need to mourn the English major, for it died a long time ago and will not be missed.
Janice, you are in a battle of wits with the unarmed! Those not hired on the basis of merit have no means of recognizing it. That's why DIE is a ratchet that goes in only one direction; it always degenerates. Things degenerate slowly at first, and then suddenly. Like everything, it will bottom out and a crisis will necessitate as reorganization. I don't think we will recognize the turning point until it is well behind us. I hope not to be around by the time the crisis hits.
Who is going to expose the academic rot?" You, Janice are doing a stellar job of it, but the minds of students have been disabled before the end of high school. I just listen to my grandchildren who receive sound wisdom at home but come home from school and say things that demonstrate the power of indoctrination and peer power over sound parenting. However, this not new. I think my grandchildren will pull through, but only because their parents are fully engaged. Sadly, they are a tiny minority.
Sure you were the diversity hire, Janice, the one intelligent woman in the department.
When you mix politics with science, you get politics. More broadly, when you mix politics with education, you get politics.
DEI is a trojan horse, first and foremost because the United States IS diverse. So what's the push to make "diverse" what already IS diverse?
I'm tail end of the baby boom and even when growing up in a suburb of Chicago, there were "diverse" people in our milieu that represented their overall percentage of the population. They were NOT "marginalized" either, unless you consider making two black students our Prom King and Queen a form of "marginalization."
I have numerous anecdotes on various DEI blunders that I've witnessed over the years, fodder for my Substack. Here's a piece that infers why no one told Claudine Gay to get rid of the plagiarism before she submitted her dissertation:
https://dogl.substack.com/p/a-buck-fifty-a-harsh-lesson-in-race
Another "offensive" story involves the diverse restaurant where I served pizza in the 80s, which traded its Mexican busboys for black kids from the Projects, with disastrous results. It's actually quite funny -- they practically paid the Mexicans' airfare to return after the black kids from the Projects debacle.
It's unfortunate, because I believe we all want to see people succeed, but the crux of DEI is to let some people get by with piss poor performance, in all too many cases, which isn't helpful to the "diverse" in any way, shape, or form. It merely teaches them that mediocrity is good enough, that skin color is merit enough, which perpetuates a true inability to compete.
Janice, unfortunately I share your bleak prognosis. DEI is deeply entrenched, far more dearly loved by most academics than the abstract principles of merit and objectivity that guided universities since the Enlightenment. This is because DEI becomes a personal mission, providing existential life meaning for its adherents. I foresee no possibility of large scale repudiation of DEI until its lies and inconsistencies lead to massive social consequences that can no longer be hid. By that time, it is an open question whether anything of our heritage will remain to be saved.
Another 10-star analysis by the esteemed Janice F. Her skepticism about the predicted end of DEI is solidly grounded in an unsurpassed understanding of the academic mindset.
Big donors like Ackman weren't bothered by the DEI hires anti-white, anti-male messaging until Israel was criticised.
I think DEI will destroy itself. It doesn't need helped along.
By its nature diversity as a focus creates the conditions for its own downfall. Claudine Gay is a case in point. Aside from the plagiarism, she was by any measure a total nonentity, someone who shouldn't even be at a community college never mind a leading university. When you remove competency as a factor, as diversity hiring always does, other factors come in to play. Different kinds of people get on. Gay quite literally wouldn't have been there had she not been black. She represents failure of diversity, and a very visible one.
So the diversity hires themselves, like Claudine Gay, will act as the poster children for the whole debacle. The university professors can cling to it all they like but most of the world looks at them like the morons they clearly are, being left behind by the competent and the able. The world laughs as the West lets the lunatics destroy the asylum.
Turning up the flame of DEI until it consumes itself is the only solution I can foresee. Let’s encourage their every bad idea and call for, no, demand, an even more diverse hiring agenda. Intellectual Diversity hasn’t been properly addressed. The entire bell curve must be proportionally represented! Perhaps bad ideas need to be let to run their course. Like you said, the private universities and online courses can take on the mantle of actual education. Let the Marxist DEI extremists spiral into interracial chaos while serious people get on with building a functioning society.
This essay is like Buckley's cough mixture. It may leave a bitter taste, but it's effective.
While “purging DEI” may indeed be daunting and distant, that still may be the easy part, because once the diversity crowd has been shown the door, whom do you replace them with?
This project has been going full steam for, as Janice says, at least two generations, really a full adult human lifetime or more. It’s not like there are masses of well-trained scholars out there working other jobs or in cryosleep pods that we can just slide into place once sanity returns.
Intellectual continuity going back centuries has been severed. There’s no manual on how to fix this, and the situation continues to worsen every year as legitimate scholarship fades further from living memory.
While DEI has certainly hurt the hard sciences and retarded their progress, I think they can recover. But how to restore a university history department, when there are no longer real historians? – same question for art history, English, sociology.
I know it’s not as black and white as that, but I don’t think people appreciate how deep the hole we’ve dug, and are still digging, is.
Sadly, I fear Janice is right about the staying power of DEI. The reality is that the idea of judging people by group membership is very ancient and persists despite the bloodshed of the US Civil War and the wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Dream of a colorblind society. The reason the Democrat party fell so naturally into this way of thinking is that it was the core that allowed their believe in slavery and Jim Crow to exist. Their dominance in the academic system has doomed academia to be on the wrong side of history as surely as if it was flying the confederate battle flag from every campus. I saw this within my own heavily academic family with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. These good liberal Democrats were practically having a religious experience at the election of a black president, as if it somehow had absolved them of all the sins they perceived they had been carrying. My response that Obama was not the first black candidate I voted for for president and that I had NOT voted for him because his racist ideology and policies were contrary to achieving Dr. King's Dream, was incomprehensible to them. Unlike most of these folks, I had grown up in a biracial and multicultural family and had long discarded the liberal white guilt that the rest of my family desperately sought divine intervention to relieve. Watching them it finally occurred to me that none of them is really about equality or achieving Dr. King's Dream. It's about feeling good about themselves and absolution from their perceived sins. This is why virtue signaling is so important to them...even if it comes at the expense of actually achieving something concrete on the issue in question.
So how does academia recover? Sadly, I think the whole thing may need to burn to the ground and be fully replaced with new institutions with entirely new employees. Certainly there are a small number of competent academics who have stood true to the mission of academia who could be brought into new institutions. The majority, however, are either too tainted to be salvaged or have demonstrated they are too self absorbed, self motivated or just too timid to be given any sort of position in the reformed/new institutions. A big way to accelerate this transition would be to completely defund academia due to its legacy of DEI hiring. That means no more federal or state funds for campuses, loans/financial aid for students or research grants. Reserve those resources fro the new institutions which would have to be built from entirely new hires. Thoughts?
Great blog as always, Janice.
I am now reading “Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World” by the great Serbian economist Branko Milanović. In it Milanović distinguishes between what he calls Liberal meritocratic capitalism, which he argues has prevailed in the US and Western Europe in the early 21st century and what he calls political capitalism, of which the People’s Republic of China is the best example, but would also include such diverse countries as Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Algeria and Tanzania. His book was published in September 2019, so it was a little surprising that even at that time he makes not a single reference to DEI, and can use the word “meritocratic” to describe North American capitalism in the 21st century without snickering. The political capitalist regimes he contrasts the US with all tend to be more corrupt than the United States and less democratic, but I suspect none of them have been contaminated by DEI in the same way or to the same extent as the US. This is perhaps part of the reason that they have, with the exception of Algeria, shown impressive growth rates in average GDP per capita between 1990/1991 and 2016, Of course, most people probably wouldn’t prefer to move to any of these countries rather than live in the US or Canada, although even this is now a matter for debate. Brock Eldon’s novella “Ground Zero in the Culture War” describes his frustration completing a Master’s degree in literature at a major Canadian university, and how he found happiness in Vietnam, a political capitalist country where DEI has not contaminated the society. Good luck to him, his lovely Vietnamese wife and their young daughter.
A second comment: I appreciate your admission that YOU yourself were a Diversity Hire. Affirmative Action-ish kinds of programs def started in the 1980s. I recall when I graduated from McGill in 1988 looking at the jobs board, where companies would advertise jobs for new engineering grads, most of the major companies explicitly stated they were hiring young women only, which meant every girl in the programs (maybe 5-20% depending on the discipline) had automatic jobs. In some sense, this may have worked against them, as when you make life too easy for someone, its dulls their abilities. Those of us who had to work hard to get jobs actually obliquely benefited, as it made us great job searchers, which actually has helped many of us for our entire careers.
A tremendous essay, Janice. Getting rid of DEI will take a while, if indeed anybody who could make that happen really wants to get rid of it. When I was looking for academic jobs in the late 70s and 80s I often heard "we had to hire a woman," a DEI refrain before DEI itself. If there is any hope, I would see it in the general decline of the college-university complex, which long ago dropped the serious business of teaching people to think and analyze and articulate. As colleges shrink, so will the influence of the professoriate. Socratic teaching was too adversarial for the profs, especially for women and feminist men. It was unacceptable to see one view as better or worse than another. Somebody's feelings might be hurt! As this rot set in, higher education swelled its administration and increasingly relied in evaluation-sensitive part-time teachers. College became very expensive. At the same time, its effectiveness was diluted. Then people discovered that in a good job market a degree was not needed, and that in a poor one it was little help. The business world saw the uselessness of higher ed and set up their own training programs. The ed market has slowly been getting the message. In the future, one can hope, there will be fewer profs and academic administrators telling the world what to think and do. No need to mourn the English major, for it died a long time ago and will not be missed.
Janice, you are in a battle of wits with the unarmed! Those not hired on the basis of merit have no means of recognizing it. That's why DIE is a ratchet that goes in only one direction; it always degenerates. Things degenerate slowly at first, and then suddenly. Like everything, it will bottom out and a crisis will necessitate as reorganization. I don't think we will recognize the turning point until it is well behind us. I hope not to be around by the time the crisis hits.