The Tyranny of DEI

One has had occasion to criticize the New York Times. One is not alone in this. But, that places one under an ethical obligation to make especial note of the New York Times when it produces excellent journalism.

Now, in the latest issue of the Times magazine, we find an article by Nicholas Confessore on DEI in the University of Michigan. The article is fair and balanced. It is comprehensive. It shows that DEI programs became the problem they were designed to solve. 

Hats off to the New York Times.

Rather than reduce racial discrimination and other forms of bigotry, DEI programs forced everyone to participate in a grievance culture, complaining about everything, accomplishing nothing. They made the campus more race conscious, and eventually more conscious of gender and ethnicity.

The programs, conducted by an army of administrators, tended to divide students and faculty. They made free and open discussion impossible, and undermined the university’s mission of educating people and advancing knowledge.

The Times does not ask the question, but we can ask what function the graduates of such DEI programs will be able to fulfill in the outside world, the world of work.

Given that affirmative action admissions programs have been declared by the Supreme Court to be discriminatory, the university has proposed that more diversity will not merely make up for past discrimination-- the go-to explanation for minority underachievement-- but would produce a culture where people would be more likely to get along.

Truth be told, this has been studied. I have reported on it in the past. Famed Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam wrote a paper entitled, “E Pluribus Unum” where he showed that when you artificially produce diverse communities their members do not interact and socialize. They hunker down. They avoid each other. 

Given the current cultural environment in the University of Michigan, it is too risky to interact with people who have special grievances. 

Following Putnam, we can see that the DEI initiatives were never going to work out. Seeing them fail, universities and other people who ignore sociology, have decided to double and triple down on diversity initiatives. An astonishing conclusion, worthy of totalitarian governance.

As for the details of how DIE compromised the mission of the university, making it into little more than an indoctrination mill filled with grievance mongers, I leave it to those who want to read the entirety of the Times article.

Making every course in every school an exercise in DIE produces courses that ignore knowledge in favor of ideological conformity. You cannot possibly graduate from such courses without being more stupid than you were when you began. 

Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.”

And also,

At the art museum, captions for an exhibit of American and European art attest to histories of oppression “even in works that may not appear to have any direct relation to these histories.” The English department has adopted a 245-word land acknowledgment, describing its core subject as “a language brought by colonizers to North America.” Even Michigan’s business school, according to its D.E.I. web page, is committed to fighting “all forms of oppression.”

The student body, the Times reports, greets this indoctrination with a “wary disdain.” To say the least.

The student attitude was clear:

On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.

Constantly beating the gospel of diversity into students' heads divides students into racial and ethnic groupings, into cult-like groups. As was to be expected, it undermines the primary purpose, the need to make people get along, not to mention learning something useful.

In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

DIE initiatives undermine the ability to speak openly and honestly.

For other critics, D.E.I. has come to subvert the spirit of intellectual pluralism envisioned in Bakke a half-century ago. Many faculty members I spoke to worried that Michigan’s press to ingrain D.E.I. into their scholarship — the diversity statements, the special fellowships, the clamor for research into contemporary social-justice issues — had narrowed its departments rather than broadening them. Disciplines and historical eras that couldn’t be jammed into an equity framework were being left to wither; even academics from minority backgrounds felt they had to present themselves as scholars of equity in order to advance.

If you create an oppressive atmosphere, people shut up and shut down. Expressing opinions becomes too dangerous.

One recent analysis by the political scientist Kevin Wallsten found that the larger the D.E.I. bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students.

Like I said, the program has been a bust. Inserting diversity training and ideology into all aspects of university life kills university life. It makes it more and more difficult to garner an education. It produces a set of bad habits that will be useless in the real world.