‘Nobody teaches Huck Finn anymore‘
It is over for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The New York Times, guilty of inflicting the 1619 Project on America three years ago, now admits that the Left’s DEI project is worse than a scam. Worse than a feather-bedding scheme for overpaid Woke bureaucrats (like the UW Medical School’s Shiva Bidar-Sielaff, Associate Dean for Diversity and Equity Transformation). By peddling an aggravated sense of otherness — and its evil henchmen, guilt and grievance — DEI is destroying civil society. (Christopher Rufo, all is forgiven!)
The headlines of this deeply researched lead story in the New York Times Magazine says it all:
The University of Michigan doubled down on DEI.
What went wrong?
A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later,
students and faculty are more frustrated than ever.
Its major points:
• Growth in higher education bureaucracy is double the rate of growth of student enrollment.
• Students and faculty are at each other’s throats, filing grievances that must be adjudicated by Woke tribunals. Like the student who complained that her white professor, despite abasing himself in the first class, did not adequately apologize for his “white privilege.”
• A climate of suspicion inhibits free expression of ideas.
• DEI is divisive. The University of Michigan differentiates among 13 distinct kinds of identity.
• Contributes to racism — as last semester’s anti-Semitic tent cities at scores of universities across the country — including here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — proved.
“Many Jewish students and alumni were astonished when, in January, a committee of Michigan DEI leaders gave the school’s Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award to a pro-Palestine student group [that] had issued a statement on Oct. 7 justifying the murder of Israeli civilians,” The NY Times’ Nicholas Confessore reports.
Some excerpts:
A year ago, the university inaugurated what it calls DEI 2.0. At Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, the number of employees who work in DEI-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70% reaching 241. … These growing bureaucracies represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power.
The larger the DEI bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students. …
In striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive. …. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement DEI programs, in theory, are meant to foster.
“It’s this gotcha culture they have created on campus,” [the professor] told me, adding: “It’s like giving a bunch of 6-year-olds Tasers.“
DEI efforts have created … a framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. … On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was DEI itself.
‘Shallow and stifling’
Students are rebelling. “On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives,” Confessore reports. “Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s DEI initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling.”
Blaska’s Bottom Line: For all that, “Despite the many millions spent on DEI,” the Times reporter finds, “the percentage of black students … was nearly as low as it was in 1970.” Same here at UW-Madison. “UW-Madison’s black student enrollment has never exceeded 3%,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported two years ago. Today it stands at 2.5%.
Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos succeeded in stemming the growth of UW system DEI bureaucrats last year.
8 responses to “NY Times buries DEI”
When the SC struck down affirmative action at Michigan, they simply ignored the ruling and proceeded under the rock-solid reasoning that a white kid could only reach his true potential if he spent four years sitting in the same classroom with black kids. They thought it worked by osmosis. Just being near a black person would be enough to woke him.
DEI is a cancer and should be eliminated. Amazing how stupid some people are who advocate for it.
Specifically, a brain tumor that has metastasized to the point that the patient is on life support. DEI is the latest offshoot of a trend that started in the late ’60s when spineless administrators gave to “demands” from agitators to create “departments” devoted to proselytizing on behalf of every race, ethnicity or gender that claimed the enviable status of victimhood. Not surprisingly, offerings in these “departments” are so hollow , vapid, and tendentious that they can only be kept afloat by requiring students to take courses in them to fulfill–you guessed it–“diversity requirements.” If they were treated like real departments, they would have folded long ago due to insufficient enrollment. Now that DEI is finally in its death throes, it’s time to eliminate any department with the word “Studies” in its title. Maybe even one day UW-Madison be headed by a Chancellor with the cojones to restore the racist rock to its rightful place.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds (“The Higher Education Bubble”) warned of Didn’t Earn It well over a decade ago.
“Even as the once-mighty University of California system slashes programs and raises tuition, it has created a new systemwide ‘vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.’ (bolds mine)
“This is on top of the already enormous University of California diversity machine, which, as Heather Mac Donald notes, ‘includes (but not limited to):
*the Chancellor’s Diversity Office,
*the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity,
*the assistant vice chancellor for diversity,
*the faculty equity advisors,
*the graduate diversity coordinators,
*the staff diversity liaison,
*the undergraduate student diversity liaison,
*the graduate student diversity liaison,
*the chief diversity officer,
*the director of development for diversity initiatives,
*the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity,
*the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues,
*the Committee on the Status of Women,
*the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion,
*the Diversity Council,
*the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center,
*the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and,
*the Women’s Center.”
“While the UC system loses top cancer researchers to Rice University, it is creating new chaired professorships in, you guessed it, diversity studies. (bolds mine)
“Likewise, in North Carolina, UNC-Wilmington is combining the physics and geology departments to save money while diverting more funding to campus diversity offices.”
This was published over 13 years ago, the researching even farther: Has this has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse?
The Gotch
The wealthy, privileged and entitled speak again.
The bigger picture of higher education is ignored. You can get accepted and start in a program. Regardless of intelligence, If you don’t have the drive, you won’t make it. Our K-12 system is simply not teaching perseverance, drive and discipline as a priority. If you don’t try, dust yourself off after failure and show up daily, you won’t make it. Self assteem is built, not given.
Maybe some of the good Liberal Social Justice warriors should eat their own cooking and give up their spot at at the UW for black students to increase from 2.5% to at least 5% of even better 10%
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