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Universities Must End DEI and Implement DEI
This is the final installment of my series proposing ways to fix the moral and educational rot that has infested American colleges and universities. Previously, I have proposed (i) enacting legislation making university trustees collectively and individually liable in tort for acts of misfeasance and nonfeasance in carrying out their fiduciary duties; (ii) implementing a two-year moratorium barring all foreign money and foreign students from entering American campuses; (iii) terminating academic faculty tenure; and (iv) ending federal and state involvement in the student-loan business. Here, I propose legislating an end to identity DEI and mandating implementation of viewpoint DEI.
READ MORE from Dov Fischer: Get the Feds and States Out of the Student Loan Business
For several years, universities have been imposing on faculty and students a regime of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). In great measure, as Tablet’s Michael Lind has shown, this DEI emerged from past campus riots over any number of public issues that radical-left students used as leverage to convert their colleges and universities into left-wing indoctrination centers. They used the Michael Brown incident (falsely highlighted by the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” lie) in Ferguson, Missouri, and later the George Floyd incident (elevated into the fraudulent “Black Lives Matter” scam), to demand the hiring of more black faculty and student interns, the admission of more black students, the establishment of black studies majors and curricula, and even the leveling of requirements on all students, even in other disciplines, to take some kind of mandatory racial studies course in pursuing their own respective majors. They used radical “climate change” issues to demand the hiring of more environmental studies faculty and student interns, the establishment of environmental studies majors and curricula, and even the leveling of requirements on all students to take a mandatory environmental course in pursuing their own respective majors. They used the #MeToo lies and defamation regarding Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and similar excuses to demand the hiring of more women faculty and student interns, the admission of more women students, the establishment of women and gender studies majors and curricula, and even the leveling of requirements on all students to take some kind of mandatory course in that field. Presently, they are attempting to leverage their opposition to Israel’s rightful existential battle for survival as a launching point to demand the hiring of more “Palestinian” faculty and student interns, the admission of more “Palestinian” students, the establishment of “Palestinian” or other one-sided “Middle East studies” majors and curricula, and even the leveling of requirements on all students to take some kind of mandatory course in “Palestinian” or one-sided “Middle East studies” while pursuing their own respective majors.
In other words, even a student majoring in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics — the “geek” majors — would be denied graduation from college or a graduate degree from a university if he or she had not attended at least one course in the demanded fields of woke “studies.” Faculty and other university employees now typically find themselves required, as part of their employment obligations, to sit through a day or more of “training” (i.e., brainwashing) in such reeducation programs.
(I once was an attorney at Heller, Ehrman, White, and McAuliffe, a once prominent but hopelessly woke major law firm headquartered in San Francisco. The company compelled the entire legal team — each and every attorney in the office, composing some 100 attorneys, many of whom were so top-notch that they billed at $500–$1,000 an hour in an era when $500 was $500 — to sit several times, for six or eight hours each session, to be “trained” by some “sensitivity expert.” None of us was racist, sexist, or homophobic. Our woke law firm had many women, BIPOC, and gay partners, and we all got along famously. But we were required to sit through the most foolish and demeaning lecturing and role playing, losing days of lucrative productivity. I still remember one of the firm’s most respected partners and main “rainmakers” (i.e., a person who brought in many of the highest-paying corporate clients) — who, also like me, was a closet conservative — telling me: “Dov, I swear, one of these days this idiotic leftist garbage is going to bankrupt this place.” And he was right. The gigantic and fabulously lucrative law firm went broke two years later. Long before Budweiser and Target, this was the original case of “go woke, go broke.” )
The idea of DEI is to require “diversity” — i.e., a diverse pool of identities: not only privileged white males but also women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, transgenders, and Native Americans. For the most part, Asians are not included and — like Jews — actually are excluded to make room for all that inclusivity. The irony is even more manifest in that women now outnumber men in the social sciences departments at most colleges and universities. That’s the “D” and the “I.”
The “E” stands for “equity.” “Equity” does not mean the same as “equality.” “Equity” means equal outcomes. Thus, “equality” means equal opportunity. With equality, everyone gets the same opportunity to compete on the same level playing field. A great example is professional sports. If you can pitch fastballs at 100 miles per hour and mix them with breaking curves, sliders, and changeups, you have a better chance of beating your competitors for a place on a major league pitching roster. That is “equality.”
Equity, by contrast, merely promises equal results blended with racial, ethnic, or gender “diversity.” So if a basketball team already has outstanding basketball players, of whom 90 percent are black and none is Asian or Jewish, equity would require a New York basketball team like the Knicks to dump five (one-third) of its 15 roster players to make room for Jews to compose approximately 16 percent of the team and Asians to compose 17 percent, even if the only dribbling they can do is at their mouths. Presumably, that would mean two Jews, two Asians, and Karl Taro Greenfeld or someone else from this list of Asian Jews.
The current state of moral and academic rot in America’s “higher education” stems, in no small measure, from the enforcement of identity DEI on the campuses. As I previously have written:
[U]niversity millions are spent on DEI — “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” — departments, racist offices fabricated out of whole cloth. For example — deep breath — the University of Michigan reported spending $18 million a year on its DEI department and 142-person staff. DEI? More like DIE. The DEI vice provost is paid $380,000 plus all benefits imaginable. Talk about privilege. But that’s not all! A closer investigation later found that UMich actually has more than 500 staff working full- or part-time on DEI with an aggregate salary-and-benefits annual cost of $30.68 million.
As a result, whole pockets of students are admitted into universities not for their stellar academic potential but because they meet the “diversity” targets, whether religious, ethnic, or racial. That even leads universities to admit disproportionate numbers of foreign students from Arab Muslim countries like Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabi because (i) as foreigners, they are charged full freight (paid for them by their foreign governments) without eligibility for in-state tuition discounts or charitable scholarships; and (ii) they check off several DEI boxes: Muslim (minority religion), Arab (minority ethnicity), perhaps female (the DEI trifecta), and perhaps non-white skin color (i.e., Four Aces). Such students manifestly have been at the fore of the recent campus riots and lawbreaking.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that “affirmative action” no longer is tenable (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181). Accordingly, the DEI discussion actually should be over — and that indeed is an important reason why it now is called “DEI” instead of “affirmative action.” By playing word games, a favorite manipulation played by the Left, the target keeps moving. “Quotas” are illegal? Call them “affirmative action.” You will lose your preferred medical insurance under Obamacare? Call it “affordable health.” The Left wants to facilitate keeping the families of illegal immigrants in the country? Call them “Dreamers.” The term “homosexual” is uncomfortable? Call them “gay.” It is horrifying to perpetrate barbaric sex change surgery on kids? Call it “gender affirming.” Liberalism and its failures have so ruined the country that, ever since Michael Dukakis, no one wants to be identified as a “card-carrying ACLU member”? So, “let’s stop calling ourselves ‘liberals’ because now, instead, we are ‘progressives.’” Arab Muslim countries tried to eradicate Israel from the face of the earth and to “drive the Jews into the sea” but lost in 1947, 1956, and 1967? So, let’s fabricate a new “nation” for Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and let’s call them “Palestinians,” and let’s rename those regions of mainland Israel “Palestine.” Give it half a century, and no one will be any the wiser. Don’t wanna say outright: “Kill the 7 million Jews of Israel”? So, chant “from the river to the sea.” Impossible to call openly for killing fetuses in the ninth month? That’s OK: call it “late term” and mix it with “pro-choice” (but don’t mistakenly use that latter term when inner-city families plead for government stipends and vouchers to enroll their kids in great schools).
It is not mere coincidence that so many of the incompetent university presidents now exposed all are DEI appointments: Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first black president and first plagiarizing president; Liz Magill, Pennsylvania’s third consecutive woman president; Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, Columbia’s first woman president and first Muslim-reared president. This is the price of DEI.
Identity DEI must be abolished.
But a new DEI must be implemented, by legislation if so needed: viewpoint DEI, i.e., diversity of political and social views, equality of opportunity for people of diverse views, and inclusion of varied views.
Surveys leave no doubt that college and university social science departments are top-heavy with tenured woke progressives. For example, they constitute 82 percent of faculty at Harvard. They self-select their successors because applicants must go through the respective departments to receive a tenure-track appointment. The department members review applicants’ academic credentials: schools attended, grades, life achievements. And then they review whether they are left-wing, neutral, or fascist (i.e., conservative). How can they possibly know? Easy: They look at the topics the applicants chose to study and research more deeply for their college and graduate school term papers and dissertations, their posts on social media, the people whom they adduce as references. Here, for example, is how DEI plagiarist President Claudine Gay describes her research:
My research and teaching interests are in the fields of American political behavior … [and] minority politics … My research has considered … how neighborhood environments shape racial and political attitudes among Black Americans; the roots of competition and cooperation between minority groups, with a particular focus on relations between Black Americans and Latinos; the effects of majority-minority districting on legislative responsiveness; processes of immigrant political incorporation; how political knowledge and policy cross-pressures shape partisan attachments among Black Americans; … shifts in the political representation of black voters; and a collaborative project with Jennifer Hochschild and Ariel White examining the effects of survey context on the measurement of linked fate.
Yes, she says she studied other things and even worked with someone named “White,” but anyone can tell where her viewpoints lie. Certainly, that is perfectly fine (if the research and writing are her own and not someone else’s). That is how social sciences departments figure out how a job applicant thinks and believes.
Because of the lopsided dominance of leftist-progressive-woke professors in university social sciences departments, students became indoctrinated and brainwashed. I went through four years of it at Columbia University and then three more years at the University of California, Los Angeles, Law School. Almost every college class had Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Frantz Fanon on the reading lists. Never heard of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, or William F. Buckley Jr. At UCLA Law School, it was the same — and still is: Every single professor either was extreme liberal, outright socialist or Marxist, or — at best — agnostic as to personal beliefs. For example, my first-year torts professor promoted so much Marxist politics that we had to form study groups outside class and buy external commercial course outlines to learn the subject on our own.
Therefore, it is imperative that the federal and state governments legislatively tie funding to requirements that the universities prove diversity of faculty viewpoints. No need for precisely 50–50. Even 40 percent conservative and 60 percent progressive-woke can do. Let us be clear: The proposal is not that any individual professor modify or compromise his or her beliefs in or out of the classroom. Rather, an onus must lie on a university and its trustees to demonstrate with ample documentation that they have engaged in meaningful outreach to attract a more balanced faculty. That is what was demanded by “affirmative action” and identity DEI, and that is what is needed for viewpoint DEI.
What gives government the right to get involved? Precisely the same as what allowed government for half a century to enforce identity DEI outreach. Governments spend billions in the aggregate to fund the best education money can buy (itself a somewhat specious premise). Therefore, the best — and perhaps only — argument for identity DEI is that all students are enriched when they come into contact with classmates from other backgrounds they never encountered. The same precise argument pertains to promoting viewpoint DEI: A student’s mind will mature in the best way if presented with a variety of viewpoints, exposed to different perspectives on the same issues, and, thus, challenged to weigh all competing theses and antitheses to reach an intelligent synthesis, whatever it be.
If we terminate identity DEI, implement viewpoint DEI, and actualize the other proposals I have offered in this series — all as one comprehensive package — there would be an overnight revolution on America’s campuses, and the moral and academic rot would be replaced by an academic renaissance.
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