Worse than the Joe McCarthy era!

What did that Stanford University administrator do when asked to restore order as law students disrupted an invited speaker? Instead of quelling the mob, she asked the speaker, a federal judge, “whether the juice was worth the squeeze”? I.E., do you really have to give your speech?

Is anyone surprised that this enabler of cancel culture was Stanford’s associate dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion?

Here at home, a systemwide survey of University of Wisconsin students found that 67.1% of liberal students want administrators to ban “harmful” views. One thing if conservatives were a numerical even match for those (il)liberal students. They’re not, by a long shot. Liberals outnumber conservative students almost four to one (57.4% to 15.8%) on the Madison campus.  

Not to mention Madison and Dane County!

Which is why we are thankful to Wisconsin Republicans for striking from Democrat(ic) Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed budget $3 million for a new, cabinet-level chief equity officer AND 18 more equity officers scattered throughout state government.

“The governor’s request comes at a time when diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are under fire in higher education, business, and in government for fundamental unfairness and divisiveness and a failure to achieve their intended goals,” the Badger Institute notes.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is riddled with DEI bureaucrats. Madison’s flagship campus has an entire administrative division devoted to the subject, headed by a deputy vice chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion (salary $131,852 as of 2021), supported by a “Gender and Sexuality Campus Center,” a multi-cultural student center, and an Office of Inclusion Education. And that’s only at the top. Every school, every college — education, engineering, business, nursing, pharmacy, letters & science, veterinary medicine, law, and agriculture — has its own DEI bureaucrats. Don’t forget the athletics department!

‘Progress requires embedding values of diversity, equity, and inclusion into the DNA of our community.’

— UW-Madison School of Business

It’s Time to Roll Back Campus DEI Bureaucracies

"Whatever the intentions, the imposition of DEI bureaucracy upon the academy has too often come at the expense of academic freedom and freedom of expression. DEI administrators have been responsible for repeated campus rights abuses." — FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression).

Political commissars

According to FIRE, from 2014 to 2022 there were 877 attempts nationally to punish scholars “for expression that is, or in public contexts would be, protected by the First Amendment.” Of these, 60% resulted in actual sanctions — “more than during the McCarthy era.”

In practice, write two Heritage Foundation researchers in National Review, “DEI staff operate as a political commissariat, articulating and enforcing a political orthodoxy on campus. … Surveys of students (including minorities) which ask about how welcome they feel on campus tend to show worse results at universities with larger DEI staffs.”

Blaska’s Bottom Line: A university that renders Academy Award-winner Fredric March a non-person and exiles a 42-ton glacial boulder accused of racism is under the heel of the DEI thought police. Contra a typically meretricious Capital Times editorial that denies the problem, a student body that goes on a vandalism rampage when a conservative speaks on campus has been well schooled in totalitarianism.

Should legislators take the next step
and pare back the glut of UW DEI commissars?