The DEI industrial complex

Reflecting on my Loyola days recently, I recalled a faculty meeting where I questioned the ineffectiveness of a new program at reversing or even simply slowing the increasing number of first-year students declining to return to Loyola for their second year. It's the classic second-year retention problem and the university mandarins decided that investing millions into a program meant to capture the hearts and minds of first-year students and bring them back to campus in their second year. The program failed. Retention declined to record lows. Millions invested to only a negative effect. The response from the administrator sent in to promote this dead horse was, "It would have been worse had we not started this program."

The DEI industrial complex - The Spectator World.pdf

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The Spectator recently analyzed two reports on the (in)effectiveness of diversity, inclusion and equity training. The first acknowledged the absence of any research as to the effectiveness of DIE programs. The second complained that DIE was not working -- or at least not showing positive outcomes -- due to a lack of commitment to the programs, despite a tripling of funding over the past few years and hundreds of programs employing scores of 'consultants' to educate corporate employees on the practices and virtues of DEI training.

This lame excuse falls under the doubling down thesis and the assertion that all you need to do to fix a failed idea is to spend even more money. It also helps that there are no meaningful metrics for DEI practices, given the abstract absurdity of the implicit goals of DEI. Here is the problem: It is against the law to apply some form of reverse discrimination to increase the number of "diverse" employees in an organization and it is absurd to believe that a constant drumbeat of BLM rhetoric and unproven concepts, e.g., "white privilege," will change the minds of people who deal with customers and competitiveness forces that make the economy grow and people of all income levels to prosper as they have for the past two hundred years.