The deep meaning of DEI

James Piereson contributes to understanding the deep meaning of Claudine Gay and the regime of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in his New Criterion column “DEI boomerang.” The title does not do it justice. Here is the concluding chunk:

College presidents, if they are not members of the Democratic Party, invariably come into office pledging to enlarge the diversity regime, which further cements the party–academic alliance. College faculties are overwhelmingly Democratic and progressive in their affiliations. College campuses are now a “base” of the Democratic Party. Academic administrators, of whom there are now many, are typically hired today to advance one or another aspect of the diversity regime. One will find few conservatives in faculty or administrative posts because they oppose the diversity regime, and so cannot be hired.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the dei movement, in large part thanks to its alliance with the Democratic Party, has locked up control over America’s leading universities. The enterprise is especially influential not only because dei is the official doctrine of the university, but also because it leans on powerful external allies in the Democratic Party. For that reason, it was shocking that a few outside critics should have been able to topple Ms. Gay while dishing out an embarrassing lesson to Harvard’s establishment.

Nearly all of the major academic controversies of recent decades have involved confrontations between advocates of diversity and others who appeared on campus to question it or were charged with saying or doing something that violated the canons of the ideology. This is true of the debates over political correctness in the 1990s; the Duke University lacrosse episode; attempts to squelch lectures by Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, and other critics of the diversity movement when they have appeared on campus; the various “hate-speech” codes that have been adopted at many schools to silence critics of the regime; the recent mobbing of a lecture by a federal judge at Stanford’s law school due to intervention by a “diversity” administrator; and many other such episodes. These situations come up less often these days: critics of the diversity regime are no longer invited to campuses in the first place. There is the continuing problem that new students arrive on campus unversed in the ins and outs of the diversity ideology, and are thus prone to violate it in some way. In order to deal with this, administrators set up orientation sessions for new students designed to inculcate diversity principles into the thinking of fresh arrivals.

Ours is not the first country in which universities have fallen under control of political parties. The history of these kinds of relationships is far from benign. Nazi leaders in Germany targeted universities for control and used them to implement party policies and spread their malignant ideology. Many of these universities were among the finest in the world before the Nazis took over. Something similar happened in the Soviet Union, though there the universities were captured by Marxism–Leninism and the Communist Party. In neither country were speakers allowed to appear on university campuses to promote ideas in opposition to party dogmas. Authorities under those regimes did not appoint university heads on the basis of scholarly credentials but rather because of their loyalty to the party and its ideology. Everyone knows how those enterprises ended. Is it a good thing that American universities are controlled by the Democratic Party, and circulate its ideological dogmas? Obviously not—and for that reason universities and the diversity agenda will inevitably confront a political reckoning.

The Harvard scandal has brought out the diversity regime into the open where Americans can see it in full—and what they see is a quasi-totalitarian operation that promotes propaganda and thought control in place of open inquiry and robust debate. It is thus no surprise that conservatives and Republicans have finally decided to fight back against that regime by defunding dei programs and bureaucracies in public universities in several states. A Republican president elected next year, possibly Donald Trump, could take the controversy into Congress and the executive departments that control higher education’s funding streams. This would pit the two parties against one another, with the American university system caught in the middle. That might turn into an edifying spectacle, and a potentially consequential one as well.

Even in the guarded terms Piereson employs, his conclusion seems to me wildly overoptimistic. This is nevertheless a useful and clarifying column. Read the whole thing here.