How DEI co-opted higher education, science and medicine

And why people like me should have done more to stop it.

Nov 22, 2023

Sometimes the fire has to be blazing in your backyard before you feel the need to get a hose going yourself.

I was going through my Substack feed a few days ago when I came across an article concerning the degree to which the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement has succeeded in taking over higher education and is now beginning to run amok in fields closely associated with education, like science and medicine, where it has even less utility, if that’s possible, and where it’s actually more dangerous.

Worse, it’s been a friendly takeover.

I had a front-row seat to this encroachment for 25 years, and I and my colleagues should have done more to stop it. We did what we thought we could, but it was not enough. Most of us viewed DEI as silly, at best, and useless, at worst, and never imagined that anyone would take it more seriously than we did. We all thought that nonsense was bound to be exposed for what it was at some point and then fade into irrelevance.

DEI evolved from affirmative action, which dates back to the early 1960's. Affirmative action began with an executive order from President Kennedy instructing federal contractors to take "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” This executive order also established the first Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity. A few years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave a boost to affirmative action by having Congress establish the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Subsequent presidents signed executive orders expanding the scope of affirmative action and creating various agencies to monitor compliance.

In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which upheld the use of race as one factor in choosing among qualified applicants in this case for admission to medical school.

Over the next four decades, a series of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court generally narrowed the scope of affirmative action even further. Into this breach came DEI, which was designed specifically to work around a legal environment that was hostile to racial quotas and the prima facie racism that they represented by recasting affirmative action in terms of the magical terms diversity, equity, and inclusion.

What enlightened person, after all, could possibly object to any of the above?

Before I explain exactly how an enlightened person could, in fact, object to all of the above, allow me to state my standard disclaimer: not everyone that I encountered in the DEI business was guided by ill-intent. Many of these folks were just trying to make the world a better place with the tools that they had at their disposal. The problem was that one of the tools they had was a big hammer in the form of the enthusiastic backing of the federal government. This made it difficult for DEI to be discussed, debated, and evaluated on its merits because objection was generally not an option.

I sat in many conference rooms over the years, discussing many hires or projects where the DEI folks had a seat at the table. Typically, we’d be discussing the need to hire a new physicist with a very specific skill set for a project or funding a project. The DEI people, despite generally having nearly zero useful input into these processes, went on ad infinitum, ad nauseum. A glance around the room would reveal more than a few eye rolls, some not so subtle. We nearly all thought that these people, though innoxious on the surface, were about as useful as a fifth wheel on a spaceship. Almost no one took them more seriously than we were forced to.

That was our mistake.

Academics are busy people. I routinely worked 60–70 hours each week during the academic year, and that was only about average for the job. You learn to focus and prioritize if you want to accomplish anything. Things that you may conveniently ignore, or anything that’s going to soak up more of your time than it’s worth, get put on the back burner. It’s the way you have to operate to get anywhere in a busy university environment vs. just running laps around the quad.

So even though everyone that I knew thought that DEI was just about useless, it was easier to go along with it, as long as the DEI administrators didn’t ask too much all at once, than to do what we should have done and just say “no.” In our defense, saying “no” would have involved picking fights with powerful interests who could affect funding and promotions and generally make your life unpleasant if they chose to. The juice just wasn’t worth the squeeze.

I was a senior lecturer for all of my time in higher education. This meant that I was not required to pursue research; my job was to teach. But I did work on a number of projects and did a ton of university service on various committees, where I often found myself at odds with the DEI people. Though I supported them when I thought they had a valid point, I was not shy about countering the most egregious of their arguments for some accommodation.

But you’d paid a price for this. The DEI people had long memories and a seat at the table on every promotion committee, every committee that screened grants and considered internal funding, and, my personal Achilles heel, every committee that evaluated student complaints against faculty. I once found myself in the middle of an ordeal that took over six months to resolve because the DEI administrators decided that I might have failed a student for an egregious act of academic dishonesty, not because he cheated on an exam but because he was gay (something I didn’t even know).

That was their sword of Damocles—the fact that DEI administrators were ingrained in nearly all facets of university operation and could make your life difficult in ways you never imagined, if they chose to. Most everyone concluded, as I did, that it was best just to keep your objections mild and your head down. You had to go along to get along.

We should not have accepted that.

This is, I suppose, a mea culpa of sorts. My generation of academics should have done more to oppose DEI and it’s kudzu-like spread. We did not do it for the reasons above, but it all now seems like a poor excuse considering the way that things have turned out. We let the current generation of academics and their students down by allowing an enterprise without merit to exert dangerously Orwellian control over institutions vital to education, public health, and scientific inquiry.

Though it’s little comfort, I wish that we had done more. Hindsight is always 20-20, but perhaps we really should have seen this coming.

Maybe we just didn’t want to.

Martin Hackworth - Howlin' at the Moon in ii-V-I

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