Monday musings: I hate to burst your bubble...
When facing potential annihilation, the DEI industry doubles down. Let's discuss.
As you read this, bills to limit or reign in DEI in higher education have been introduced in the legislatures of two dozen states: Oregon, Montana, Arizona, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Florida, Utah, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Mississippi is in the initial stages of considering such a bill.
Yet the DEI industry, far from reasonably adopting the humility to ponder what they could have possibly done to antagonize the legislatures of roughly half of the states in the country, seems bent on doubling down on patently illiberal, unpopular, misguided, and discriminatory policies. In places where DEI has been curtailed or banned, universities have rebranded the offices and given new job titles to the same group of staff and administrators. “Office of Student Engagement” being a popular new pseudonym.
Surprised? I’m not. I could have told you that.
I once served on the athletic board of a state university. We met once a month to discuss revenue, NCAA rule violations, Title IX compliance, scholarships, etc. During one meeting, the person who had just assumed the position of heading what would now be referred to as the DEI office at that university, a died-in-the-wool NPR liberal, went into a tirade about the lack of racial diversity at our university.
Her rant conveniently ignored the fact that this particular school, located in a small town in the Intermountain West, had a relatively large student population of Hispanics and native Americans. I know, I know—forgive me for assuming that there was reason at the other end of it.
And she was even wrong about the racial category over which she was uniquely concerned: African Americans. Our community, a railroad town, had harbored an African American community for almost a century. A fact that should have been difficult to ignore due to the prominent AME church that she drove by every day on her way to campus.
Was the history perfect? No, it was not. It was, however, better than the history of our country as a whole. And the current environment of that community is far removed from that of the early part of the previous century.
But when the trajectory of one’s well-compensated administrative career depends on leading battles against phantoms, one needs to stoke the illusion of a still-troubled landscape fraught with conflict for all that it’s worth. After fifteen minutes of impassioned speech about how she was going to kick ass and take names while reforming our campus, she announced that the community would come next, with her leading the charge.
That rallying cry, even for a room full of mostly leftist academics, was a bridge too far. The notion that a newly-arrived liberal transplant from back east was going to patrol the streets of a blue-collar mountain town in the west and, sans any actual authority, call the tune to which the local inbreeds (who’d done just fine by themselves for a century) would now dance was simply laughable. The only person among the dozen or so in the room who didn’t find that notion absurd was the person doing the talking.
Derision was nearly ubiquitous. It was the first and only time I ever saw anyone push back that hard against DEI nonsense in a quarter of a century.
But that, in a nutshell, is why DEI won’t go away easily or quietly, no matter what laws are passed. Action at a distance won't solve the DEI issue; it’ll require close-quarters combat. Social justice warriors are true believers, stoked with as much of the holy spirit as a serpent handler in the hollows of Appalachia. SJWs live in bubbles that are about as impervious to outside influence as the core of a neutron star, with egos that are big enough to serve as their own sources of gravity. You’re not fixing any of that with directives from state capitols.
The carrot-and-stick approach hasn’t shown much promise either. In Wisconsin, the UW Board of Regents approved, last December, a deal with the state legislature to receive $800 million in raises and new benefits for about 35,000 employees in exchange for rolling back DEI and creating more philosophical balance in the UW system. But, having taken the money, schools are already trying to wiggle around the DEI limits, as University of Wisconsin first-year law students just found out. The DEI apparatchiks evidently got the money without the accompanying memo.
In the fullness of time, dismantling DEI will be found to require a hands-on approach. It’s not going to be enough just to wag fingers or dangle carrots; it’s going to require a very large stick.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com
In my experience with a DEI based student council the positions were picked by high
level admin then groomed. Replacement when needed was then picked by the students. To note these positions on this particular student council were also paid positions funded by the student fees paid to the school. The same school did exactly what you said and rebranded it’s still all there hiding in plain sight under new acronyms.
Martin, I wonder if you could explain the mechanics of how this can happen. I mean, who is authorized to hire people like this. It seems to me that either an already woke faculty has the power or the head of the university makes the choice. Maybe it’s another mechanism, so please enlighten us.