The death of higher education

January 9, 2023. How DEI is supplanting truth as the mission of American universities. This is a courageous, spot on article that expands upon, explains and reinforces the basic premise that troubles me deeply about higher education in America, and that is this: American universities have abandoned their educational mission for social engineering, a highly questionable, unscientific, mission called DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion).

One theory that makes sense to me that this is an effort by liberal arts faculty to reclaim mindshare in the curriculum, creating new courses, new requirements and new majors, all designed to satisfy feelings rather than to convey content or to develop critical thinking skills. In fact, gibberish is replacing significant content and DEI administrators, faculty and students are trying to end the conversation, deny critical thinking, and cancel those not aligning with this madness. Jordan Peterson is the poster boy for their wrath: He won't accept their cancel culture, silly pronoun, gender fluid, reparations mentality.

Worse, every dollar that goes to DEI administrators is money that could be going to instruction and research in areas that have significance to any university with a coherent public or private mission. As the article notes -- with the excerpt also below -- Ohio State has 132 DEI administrators on its payroll, while it is also sad to say, their football coach, Ryan Day, earns $9.5 million this year. As Bob Greene notes:

One of Mr. Day’s coaching predecessors at Ohio State, Hayes had already won three consensus national championships for the school when Ford made his speech. At the time, Hayes’s annual salary was around $27,000, according to contemporaneous reporting.

That isn’t a typo. Football coaches hadn’t yet discovered they could demand the keys to the universities’ vaults. Even adjusted for inflation, Hayes’s salary was the equivalent of only some $165,000 in 2023 dollars—a rounding error for Messrs. Smart and Day.

But when the university approached Hayes during the 1974 season about a nice raise, he said no.

The reason? Hayes thought Ford’s message had great merit and felt it was his responsibility to help ease inflation by refusing a bigger salary. It seemed downright unpatriotic to take a raise. He was confident that he and his wife, Anne, could get along fine on $27,000.

And people wonder why public school tuition and college game football tickets are so expensive today. NOTE: About the time Hayes was helping whip inflation (on campus), I was in the midst of nine years of university education, where my entire tuition bill was funded by scholarships, merit awards and graduate assistantships.

Yet it would be wrong to assume that the STEM, science-based fields are immune to such nonsense. Match, engineering, medicine and other data- and fact-based fields have succumbed to this Orwellian world.

Meanwhile, college tuition rates and student college debt have exploded, while the skill and mind sets of college graduates has eroded, often making them unwilling or unable to function in the high-tech, fast-paced, STEM-based workplace. Millions of American adults have chosen to not even look for work, while millions of jobs remain unfilled. And Biden's fiscal and monetary policies pour hundreds of billions into non-work while also finding that perhaps tens of billions of dollars are also being siphoned off by fraud, including massive scamming efforts.

The article from the Free Press is long yet well worth the read.

How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities.pdf

Download PDF • 1.09MB

Some excerpts here:

The principles commonly known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are meant to sound like a promise to provide welcome and opportunity to all on campus. And to the ordinary American, those values sound virtuous and unobjectionable.

But many working in academia increasingly understand that they instead imply a set of controversial political and social views. And that in order to advance in their careers, they must demonstrate fealty to vague and ever-expanding DEI demands and to the people who enforce them. Failing to comply, or expressing doubt or concern, means risking career ruin.

In a short time, DEI imperatives have spawned a growing bureaucracy that holds enormous power within universities. The ranks of DEI vice presidents, deans, and officers are ever-growing—Princeton has more than 70 administrators devoted to DEI; Ohio State has 132. They now take part in dictating things like hiring, promotion, tenure, and research funding.

**

How has this fundamental shift taken place? Gradually, then all at once.

For decades, university administrators have emphasized their commitment to racial diversity. In 1978, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell delivered the court’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, taking up the question of racial preferences in higher education. Powell argued that racial preferences in admissions—in other words, affirmative action—could be justified on the basis of diversity, broadly defined. Colleges and universities were happy to adopt his reasoning, and by the 1980s, diversity was a popular rallying cry among university administrators.

By the 2010s, as the number of college administrators ballooned, this commitment to diversity was often backed by bureaucracies that bore such titles as “Inclusive Excellence” or “Diversity and Belonging.” Around 2013, the University of California system—which governs six of the nation’s top 50 ranked universities—began to experiment with mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements became a standard requirement in the system by the end of the decade. The University of Texas at Austin in 2018 published a University Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, which began to embed diversity committees throughout the university.

Then came the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. The response on campus was a virtual Cambrian explosion of DEI policies. Any institution that hadn’t previously been on board was pressured to make large-scale commitments to DEI. Those already committed redoubled their efforts. UT Austin created a Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, calling for consideration of faculty members’ contributions to DEI when considering merit raises and promotion.

**

Many American college students are now required to take DEI, anti-racism, or social justice courses. At Georgetown, all undergraduates must take two Engaging Diversity courses. At Davidson College, the requirement goes under the title of Justice, Equality, and Community, which students can fulfill by taking courses like Racial Capitalism & Reproduction and Queer(ing) Performance. Northern Arizona University recently updated its general education curriculum to require nine credit hours of “diversity perspectives” courses, including a unit on “intersectional identities.”

DEI is also becoming a de facto academic discipline. In 2021, Bentley University in Massachusetts created a DEI major. Last year, the Wharton School announced its introduction of a DEI concentration for undergraduates and a DEI major for MBA students.

Meantime, the open faculty position listings at universities across the country illustrate how a focus on race, gender, social justice, and critical theory can be crucial to landing a job. Last year, the University of Houston–Downtown sought an instructor in Early Modern British Literature, including Shakespeare, with a preferred specialization in “critical race studies.” At Wake Forest University, an applicant for assistant professor of Spanish should be someone “whose critical perspectives are linked to the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education in ways that inform and influence their pedagogical approach.” Williams College recently sought an assistant professor of German who works “in the areas of migration, race and anti-racism, post- and decolonial approaches, disability, and/or memory studies.”