Diversity
January 15, 2024 — John Hinderaker
More evidence that the federal government has gone stark, raving mad: The Federal Aviation Administration is actively recruiting workers who suffer “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. “Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s
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January 12, 2024 — John Hinderaker
A group of Jewish graduate students at Harvard, including several from the law school, have sued that university alleging rampant anti-Semitism in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The complaint is embedded below, and I encourage you to at least skim it–it is 77 pages long. What is striking about the complaint is the breadth and depth of its factual allegations. If they are true,
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January 5, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Bill Ackman is a lifelong liberal whose political donations have been to Democrats. But, as a Harvard alumnus and a Jew, he was appalled by Claudine Gay’s incompetent and borderline anti-Semitic Congressional testimony, as well as her lack of any body of original scholarship. So for the first time, he stepped into the cultural and political fray. The Left responded predictably, by attacking his wife, Neri Osman, who is brilliant
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January 3, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Bill Ackman is the wealthy Harvard alumnus who has taken the lead in trying to reform that institution. In the wake of Claudine Gay’s self-destruction, he wrote this lengthy Twitter post in which he diagnoses the sickness of institutions like Harvard. It is very good, and appropriately uncompromising in its denunciation of the totalitarian DEI culture that prevails on campuses and elsewhere. Money quote: DEI is inherently a racist and
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January 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Well, 2024 seems to be off to a great start: Claudine Gay is resigning as president of Harvard. It had to kill the Harvard establishment to take this step, since they had framed the possibility as “giving in to the right.” Of course the problem is that Gay’s resignation will change little at Harvard, or any other elite university. It is a certainty that Harvard will find someone equally committed
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November 3, 2023 — Steven Hayward
DEI—the campus acronym that someone has suggested really means “division, exclusion, and ideology”—really does follow the principle of the cancer cell, as its malignant influence on campuses grows by sucking up blood and infecting the cells around it. Most campus DEI departments have been conspicuously silent since October 7, in most cases because they are fully on the side of the campus anti-Semites. (Berkeley’s vice chancellor for DEI, Dania Matos,
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July 21, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a heartwarming article on DEI: “The Rise and Fall of the Chief Diversity Officer.” Two years ago chief diversity officers were some of the hottest hires into executive ranks. Now, they increasingly feel left out in the cold. Companies including Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs. Thousands of diversity-focused workers
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July 8, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Like most of corporate America, Hollywood has fallen prey to the “DEI” delusion in recent years. Far from being a good thing, corporate “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” measures generally represent a poisonous brew of racism, leftism and anti-Americanism. The sooner this fad fades from the scene, the better. In the Telegraph, U.S. Editor Nick Allen sees signs that the entertainment industry is moving back toward sanity: Hollywood is suffering “diversity
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June 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Within an hour of the release of the Supreme Court decision in the “affirmative action” cases yesterday, President Biden stepped forth with his pitty-pat steps to mumble his disparagement of it. The White House has posted the transcript of his halting remarks here. Biden spoke about the effects of the “affirmative action” regime with the confidence of a guidance counselor, but not the candor. On that point, he regurgitated the
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June 13, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Some red states are leaders in public policy, consistently enacting conservative measures that drive their economies forward. But in some red states, conservatives are frustrated that large Republican majorities don’t necessarily produce solid conservative legislation. One of those states is Texas. Republicans control the Texas House of Representatives 85-64 and the Senate 19-12. Texas has a Republican governor, Greg Abbott. And yet, despite those numbers and the state’s conservative image,
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May 16, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Seth Mandel, writing in the current issue of Commentary: By every metric, American Jewish campus life is a shadow of what it once was. The City University of New York is losing the last two Jewish members of its 80-member senior leadership team—in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world. Jewish enrollment in elite universities, most notably the Ivy League, is in free fall. And a sense
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May 16, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed legislation in Florida defunding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in Florida’s state universities, and while the diversicrats will probably go to ground by embedding themselves with bureaucratic workarounds, it is already paying dividends. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports: Statehouses’ Targeting of Diversity and Tenure Is Starting to Scare Away Faculty Job Candidates Recently proposed and passed legislation that targets tenure and diversity, equity,
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May 5, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Sadly, having large Republican majorities in a legislature does not guarantee sound public policy. A case in point comes from the current session in Texas, where conservatives are trying to stamp out the left-wing race and gender ideologies that have been institutionalized at the University of Texas. Texas SB 17 would defund and prohibit DEI departments, officers, employees, training, and so on in Texas state colleges and universities. The bill
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May 3, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Back in December we reported on Stanford University’s attempt to instruct everyone on language use with their “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” It read like a parody of our idiotic woke university culture today, and Stanford quickly withdrew it on account of the massive public embarrassment it generated. Now it is Columbia University’s turn. Columbia’s “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Guide” also works hard to instruct us proper meaning and
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April 12, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Everything else is, so why not? This question is prompted by the revelation that the University of Minnesota paid a diversity consultant more than $200,000 to develop an online anti-racism training course for the University’s hospitals and maternity centers. Does anyone seriously think that the University of Minnesota’s hospital system is racist? Of course not. This course is meant to combat “implicit bias,” which means that no one in these
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March 2, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
United Airlines took to Twitter this week to proclaim that an all-LGBTQ+ crew had just completed a flight from San Francisco to Sydney. A video inside the tweet showed two employees unveiling the image of a koala bear – wearing heart-shaped sunglasses – waving an enormous LGBTQ flag on the side of the aircraft. The airline may have been surprised to learn that for many passengers, safety trumps diversity. Although
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February 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward
This Bloomberg story is a few weeks old, but worth savoring nonetheless, as I expect it is the beginning of a new trend that will spread rapidly, eventually reaching college campuses when revenues start to fall as enrollment declines: At Twitter, the diversity, equity and inclusion team is down to just two people from 30, one former employee said. A DEI worker who was let go from a popular ride-share company said
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