The dismantling of DEI in America continues. It happened last week in the entire University of North Carolina system, and now occurred the University of Wyoming. This short post just documents what is clearly a trend—one I thought wouldn’t happen until I was six feet under. Click on the headline below to read the article from USA Today:
The piece:
The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees voted unanimously last week to eliminate the school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) department and move its staff and some of its programming to other departments on campus.
The decision was made to balance input from the university community and the will of the Wyoming legislature, according to a written statement by University President Dr. Ed Seidel.
“We received a strong message from the state’s elected officials to change our approach to DEI issues. At the same time, we have heard from our community that many of the services that might have incorrectly been categorized under DEI are important for the success of our students, faculty and staff,” Seidel says. “These initial steps are a good-faith effort on the part of the university to respond to legislative action while maintaining essential services.”
Additionally, the University will no longer require job applicants to “submit statements regarding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and no longer evaluating employees’ commitment to DEI in annual performance evaluations.”
State lawmakers voted in March to cut $1.73 million from the University of Wyoming’s block grant and forbid state funding for the school’s diversity program. At a packed Board of Trustees meeting in March, students, educators, and community members rallied in support of DEI initiatives, and the Board of Trustees pledged to vote on a path forward at their May meeting.
The decision from the Board of Trustees comes amidst a heated national debate on DEI. Donald Trump recently spoke against the “DEI revolution” and pledged to crush “anti-white” racism. Defenders of DEI argue that its programming is necessary in acknowledging the present-day effects of past violence.
The last sentence is the one that’s worth discussing. Are there inimical effects on today’s society of past “violence”? (I’d use “racism” rather than “violence”.) The answer is indubitably “yes.” Given that, how do we rectify them? How can we make people at least share a minimum level of equality and well being? One remedy is the “color blind” approachy: giving everyone equal treatment and opportunity. But as is often pointed out, many minorities already begin with two strikes against them, having inherited a culture which isn’t conducive to conventional social success. Until recently that was also the case for women, but that’s being rectified very quickly.
The remedy I’ve tentatively hit on, one that seems fair and still maintains the virtues of meritocracy, is also a remedy that seems impossible: assure all Americans that they have equal opportunity from birth. That’s impossible not only because of inherited status and wealth, but because at least increasing opportunities by a decent modicum, ensuring good schools for all, cultures conducive to well being and success, decent medical care and other bits of the social safety net—seem to require both resources and a will that is lacking in America. In that respect we need to be more like Iceland or Denmark but we’re demographically and socially quite different. Topping it all off, we don’t know which interventions will work, especially for fixing education. Throwing money at schools doesn’t seem to improve education much, and so we have to go through a slow empirical process of testing different interventions.
But I’ve digressed. One thing I can say is that the way DEI is used today in America is not creating more social justice. In contrast, it’s creating more division and resentment, more guilt and victimhood, and promoting a denigration of merit that can’t be good in the long run.
I’ve also pointed out that some aspects of DEI are worthy, like having a place to adjudicate harassment and bias, but this kind of monitoring hasn’t been done well. (For example, I object to anonymous “bias reporting” that chills speech and creates a climate of fear. By all means have a place to report bias, but it can’t be anonymous.) And schools can reach out to truly diverse communities, not just involving ethnicity, but also socioeconomic status and different viewpoints. Oh, and bring back mandatory standardized testing, which seems to be good for everyone.
But now I’ve digressed too much and am off for a fat, juicy burger (no steak this week), so I’ll just convey the news above and pass on.
h/t: Ginger K.
If the problem is black culture (an anti-academic culture of denigrating trying hard in school as “acting white”, and lauding rebelling against school/authority as being “authentically black”), then the main thing that needs to happen is fixing black culture. And the first step has to be saying that out loud.
Currently, all of the “anti-racist” rhetoric is the opposite, suggesting — contrary to all the evidence these days — that it is white culture (“systemic racism”) that is the problem.
All the evidence is that what produces a “good school” is the intake of kids. It’s not the buildings, it’s not the teachers (most are good enough) and it’s not the funding levels (the American taxpayer spends more per black kid then per white kid).
Thought experiment: take high-achieving schools and low-achieving schools and swap the cohorts of kids around, leaving the buildings, teachers and funding levels as-is. Which would then be the “good schools”?
The main will that is lacking is the will to face up to realities. The mainstream discourse on this topic, from Biden down, is actively avoiding having to do that.
Thank you for those forthrightly expressed sentiments. The phrase “bad schools” is tossed around in the media all the time. Rarely if ever in the next breath or two is the phrase defined.
I once substitute taught in a seventh-grade class. The class was an elective exploring careers. I’ve done several things in my not-so-young-anymore life. I’ve made a few mistakes. I’m cheerily inclined to relay my school-of-hard-knocks experiences to youngsters so that they might avoid such uninformed mistakes. In the class a student of a certain cultural/ethnic heritage told me, “You have nothing to teach me.”
I silently replied, “Why – because I am not of your cultural/ethnic heritage?” I said nothing out loud in response because I wanted to keep the peace, it was only a one-day gig and, after all, who was I to debate the issue with such a soul, so marvelously and bountifully informed at such a tender age? More than a few years have passed. i wonder how he is doing.
‘In the class a student of a certain cultural/ethnic heritage told me, “You have nothing to teach me.”’
“Critical theory” appears to be a form of Platonic mysticism, where discrete group Identities are the ultimate reality, and human beings, with their shared and shareable experiences, are only the shadow, an illusion that only those trained in the theory can see through.
I agree with Jerry it’s not in college but in childhood that these improvements can be made. By the time students get to my university classroom there’s little I can do to make them want to study or learn, I can only make my classes more interesting or useful for those who do want it.
Not being American I can’t speak to the resources or will that might (not) be lacking. But I’d say the evidence so far is that resources added to schools and preschools has not helped.
Why? Families largely determine whether the child’s school can successfully teach the child, and it matters less how much money and attention that school gets. Families from different cultures differ in the value they place on school and education (and the social behaviours required to succeed in school). I think we need to change how families teach their kids to value learning before we can improve racial gaps in academic performance (and college admissions and medical schools etc.).
I think that applies to all academic performance gaps, including the well-documented differences between white kids and Asian kids (not just the gap everyone wants to talk about between black and white kids).
Lots of evidence such values can change: many (most?) families used to teach their kids several raw forms of racism (especially against black and Jewish people); most people used to oppose interracial marriage and basic human rights for gay people; but fewer families teach their children these bigotries any longer.
We can do it [rolls up sleeves emoji]!
Some thoughts, bold added :
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
– Thomas Jefferson, and then edited by the Committee of Five, which consisted of Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston (1776)
Rousseau: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” (The Social Contract, 1762)
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976): flungness, thrownness, or Geworfenheit (Being and Time (1927) I guess from reading about it)
And then Marx, Engels, Mao, Lenin, Stalin, et. al. thought they knew as gods how to “change it”, meaning the chains, to create heaven on earth, by creation of a “species-being” with “species-consciousness” (quotes are from Marx’s writing).
Who can solve the riddle of where happiness comes from, and where is that solution? Religion? The state? The individual? Elsewhere?
These are profound ideas, and important to develop. There is value in pursuit of an understanding.
People are happy when they get what they want. The problem of happiness is solved by getting what one wants, or by changing one’s mind about what one wants. Of course, there might not be enough of what one wants to go around if too many want the same thing. Then we do the obvious thing: fight. One can achieve happiness by winning the fight. Not everyone can be happy. In fact, in principle, what someone wants can be the unhappiness of someone else. I know someone, who, I strongly suspect, does not want to be happy. So one can be happy and unhappy simultaneously, if that is what one wants. 🙂 🙂
Equal opportunity from birth (or even before birth) should be the goal and this is where the efforts should lie.
Regarding DEI, it’s hard for me to believe that college administrators were every truly on board. Why would they willingly tie up so much of their budgets in programs that would become albatrosses around their necks? But without a catalyst, college administrators had no way to get rid of DEI without being branded as racist.
But state legislatures—many of them conservative—are providing a catalyst.
Now that the tide has turned—DEI programs in the private sector were already on the way out—the dominoes are falling.
>”. . . assure all Americans that they have equal opportunity from birth.”
Even if this were possible, which PCC(E) seems to think it is not, would it satisfy the anti-racists who are looking for their reparations and retaliation? In a zero-sum game, the only evidence that you have won something is that you have made the other guy worse off. The appeal of DEI was that for all its faults it demonstrably made white people worse off, and therefore must have improved the lot of black people without their even having to apply themselves. Regardless of whether one feels we owe these people anything — I’ll leave it up to Americans to figure that out — DEI provides entirely the wrong incentives as well as having large negative externalities in the form of the loss of meritorious hiring and the cost of measuring compliance.
Centuries from now, anthropologists studying academia will pore over records of the last 10 years in the hope of discovering how the DEI craze happened. One question will be: WHO came up with the idea of the current DEI system of anonymous complaint reporting? Did nobody realize that anonymous snitching would virtually invite abuse? Did the tribes of academia in the 2010s include nobody who had heard of the east German Stasi, and similar examples in other would-be utopias? I guess not, since these object lessons had collapsed 20 years earlier, and had apparently disappeared down the memory hole..
Red America seems to be taking the lead in dismantling DEI as a formal structure. Given the stark political and cultural divisions in our country, I wonder whether Blue America will reflexively double down on DEI/anti-racism in return.
My fear is that DEI will simply shape-shift and survive within these institutions.
Indeed. This change was initiated by the state government. They cut the block-grant and said no public funding for diversity. The article states that the Board of Trustees meeting was packed with students, educators and the community all strongly supporting DEI. States are cutting funding and colleges are responding, accordingly. I’m afraid that the mindset will take much longer to change if it changes at all.
Equity is a myth. Fairness is a myth. Equal opportunity is a myth. You don’t get to choose where you were born, the family you’re born into, the body you’re born with or your intelligence. The key to life is to make the best out of the hand God dealt you. Society’s job is to take down obstacles…racial prejudice and animosity…financial barriers to schools that can optimize one’s intellect…and DEI which is racist because it uses past injustice to minimize the merit potential of people of color like me.