Mandatory DEI statements are akin to swearing fealty to a religious order and have no place in an academic institution (unless that institution is specifically religious). As a former academic, I loathe what academia has become and can't imagine having to swear an oath of fealty that leads to researching only topics that affirm the orthodoxy of the woke.
This is a lucid and cogent statement of common sense. I am glad that a Harvard law professor chose to make it. I would however have welcomed a definition of “social justice” that includes the full range of disadvantaged groups including poor working class white people who are excluded from the DEI catechism and thus expose its true exclusionary nature.
“The DEI ethos did not emerge from nowhere—it emerged from a laudable determination to free academia of attitudes and practices that impeded potential contributors for prejudicial reasons, thereby depriving institutions of higher learning of useful talents.” I would say that the DIR ethos emerged from a superficial and ethnocentric reading of colonial analysis, which had been formulated with insight by historians and social scientists from the 1960s through the 1980s, with a social base in the anti-colonial movements of the Third World. A superficial reading driven by black middle-class interests in the context of a stagnating economy and white guilt for having failed to seriously encounter the insights of the African-American movement from 1954 to 1972.
DEI is racism. DEI is hate. It is appalling that ideological allegiance to racism/hate is now mandatory in many quarters. University of California now requires DEI statements. The people of California have voted twice to reject racism. UC has made it mandatory. Quote from “For University of California Faculty, It’s DEI or Die”
“Since 1996, race-based preferences in faculty hiring have been illegal throughout California’s public universities, thanks to Prop. 209. However, the state’s largest public employer — the University of California system, with its over 227,000 employees state-wide — works hard to balance the race of its faculty and staff in spite of Prop. 209’s antidiscrimination mandate.
And as the UC system has discovered, DEI statements are an effective tool for racially balancing faculty, and it is open about this. In 2017, the University Office of the President explained that although “Proposition 209 eliminated some of the tools that UC had previously employed to achieve diversity in its faculty,” the university could use DEI statements to “increase[e] the presence of underrepresented minorities (African-American, Chicano, (a)/Latino (a)/Hispanic, and Native American) and women in its faculty.” The university’s experiments showed that an aggressive DEI statement policy that considers a candidate’s views on DEI before even looking at their qualifications could increase minority hiring as much as tenfold.”
DEI is (among other things) a successful attempt to subvert democracy. When Martin Luther King spoke about his hope that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” he was rejecting DEI.
It seems that it will take black males in academia and the media to fight this - what appears to me to be almost a pagan witch belief system promulged by radical females in academia and media.
What really pisses me off is the people exploiting and corrupting the principles of Western liberalism - namely that of protected free speech and free expression... where the moral majority supported and allowed radical discant and protest because of these rights... and now, because they abused and trashed those rights to infiltrate positions of influence and power to weaponize them for malcontent politics... turning them into a money and power-making industry... we are at a place where those rights are at risk across the board.
I really want to destroy the professional identity any professional activist and take away their ability to protest or influence anyone else. We should start in the academia.
The fact that I support this type of seemingly extreme (maybe not if you consider that free speech and free expression are supposed to be individual human rights... where the people take time out from their regular life to agitate for cause... not work for an NGO to agitate professionally) thinking at this time given my worldview of libertarian views, I think, is a bit alarming and the reason that we need some greater intolerance of professional, organized activism.
DEI is just a tool of a collective of societal malcontent professional activists that have exploited and corrupted our God-given human rights of free speech and expression as enshrined in our governing principles so they can harvest the returns of chaos, power and money from the system.
Frank Lee writes, “It seems that it will take black males in academia and the media to fight this [the DEI ethos]”.
In 1988, when I was a Jesse Jackson delegate at the convention of the South Carolina Democratic Party, I observed that elderly black women spoke with enormous moral authority in the Jackson delegation. Prior to election of the final delegate to the National Democratic Convention, one of a group of elderly black women rose to call upon all black candidates to withdraw in order to ensure a better black-white balance, because Rev. Jackson’s had asked for it, and because it was the right thing to do. Near me were a couple of younger black men who clearly did not like the idea, but they dared not challenge the moral authority of the elderly black women.
As a result of that gesture, I was elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, elected from ten or eleven white candidates. Following the vote, I approached the group of elderly black women to thank them, and I was received by them with much respect and encouragement.
Is that moral voice still present in the black community? Can it be invoked to call for an end of the divisive, arrogant, and authoritarian tactics of the DEI ethos?
The authorities who mandated DEI could have taken a look at a long-standing precedent, the required statement in officers' periodic evaluations by their superiors. Every one of these documents I had occasion to read complied by including a comment with very slight stylistic variation, "Captain X contributes forcefully to equal opportunity concepts." In my own case, I always thought it meant that I diligently endeavored to secure the conviction of criminal offenders and the maximum authorized sentence, regardless of race, color, creed, sex, or national or ethnic origin. I expect this standard would now be extended, "sex, sexual orientation, or sexual identification", assuming DoD has not adopted the dogma that color blindness is racist.
About damn time.
Mandatory DEI statements are akin to swearing fealty to a religious order and have no place in an academic institution (unless that institution is specifically religious). As a former academic, I loathe what academia has become and can't imagine having to swear an oath of fealty that leads to researching only topics that affirm the orthodoxy of the woke.
Exactly. You might as well be asking a candidate to write a faith statement to Jesus or Mohammed. But it’s even more like a cult. The Cult of DEI.
This is almost exactly what I was going to write. Thank you for saving me the digital ink!
This is a lucid and cogent statement of common sense. I am glad that a Harvard law professor chose to make it. I would however have welcomed a definition of “social justice” that includes the full range of disadvantaged groups including poor working class white people who are excluded from the DEI catechism and thus expose its true exclusionary nature.
“The DEI ethos did not emerge from nowhere—it emerged from a laudable determination to free academia of attitudes and practices that impeded potential contributors for prejudicial reasons, thereby depriving institutions of higher learning of useful talents.” I would say that the DIR ethos emerged from a superficial and ethnocentric reading of colonial analysis, which had been formulated with insight by historians and social scientists from the 1960s through the 1980s, with a social base in the anti-colonial movements of the Third World. A superficial reading driven by black middle-class interests in the context of a stagnating economy and white guilt for having failed to seriously encounter the insights of the African-American movement from 1954 to 1972.
https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/
DEI is racism. DEI is hate. It is appalling that ideological allegiance to racism/hate is now mandatory in many quarters. University of California now requires DEI statements. The people of California have voted twice to reject racism. UC has made it mandatory. Quote from “For University of California Faculty, It’s DEI or Die”
“Since 1996, race-based preferences in faculty hiring have been illegal throughout California’s public universities, thanks to Prop. 209. However, the state’s largest public employer — the University of California system, with its over 227,000 employees state-wide — works hard to balance the race of its faculty and staff in spite of Prop. 209’s antidiscrimination mandate.
And as the UC system has discovered, DEI statements are an effective tool for racially balancing faculty, and it is open about this. In 2017, the University Office of the President explained that although “Proposition 209 eliminated some of the tools that UC had previously employed to achieve diversity in its faculty,” the university could use DEI statements to “increase[e] the presence of underrepresented minorities (African-American, Chicano, (a)/Latino (a)/Hispanic, and Native American) and women in its faculty.” The university’s experiments showed that an aggressive DEI statement policy that considers a candidate’s views on DEI before even looking at their qualifications could increase minority hiring as much as tenfold.”
DEI is (among other things) a successful attempt to subvert democracy. When Martin Luther King spoke about his hope that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” he was rejecting DEI.
It seems that it will take black males in academia and the media to fight this - what appears to me to be almost a pagan witch belief system promulged by radical females in academia and media.
What really pisses me off is the people exploiting and corrupting the principles of Western liberalism - namely that of protected free speech and free expression... where the moral majority supported and allowed radical discant and protest because of these rights... and now, because they abused and trashed those rights to infiltrate positions of influence and power to weaponize them for malcontent politics... turning them into a money and power-making industry... we are at a place where those rights are at risk across the board.
I really want to destroy the professional identity any professional activist and take away their ability to protest or influence anyone else. We should start in the academia.
The fact that I support this type of seemingly extreme (maybe not if you consider that free speech and free expression are supposed to be individual human rights... where the people take time out from their regular life to agitate for cause... not work for an NGO to agitate professionally) thinking at this time given my worldview of libertarian views, I think, is a bit alarming and the reason that we need some greater intolerance of professional, organized activism.
DEI is just a tool of a collective of societal malcontent professional activists that have exploited and corrupted our God-given human rights of free speech and expression as enshrined in our governing principles so they can harvest the returns of chaos, power and money from the system.
Frank Lee writes, “It seems that it will take black males in academia and the media to fight this [the DEI ethos]”.
In 1988, when I was a Jesse Jackson delegate at the convention of the South Carolina Democratic Party, I observed that elderly black women spoke with enormous moral authority in the Jackson delegation. Prior to election of the final delegate to the National Democratic Convention, one of a group of elderly black women rose to call upon all black candidates to withdraw in order to ensure a better black-white balance, because Rev. Jackson’s had asked for it, and because it was the right thing to do. Near me were a couple of younger black men who clearly did not like the idea, but they dared not challenge the moral authority of the elderly black women.
As a result of that gesture, I was elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, elected from ten or eleven white candidates. Following the vote, I approached the group of elderly black women to thank them, and I was received by them with much respect and encouragement.
Is that moral voice still present in the black community? Can it be invoked to call for an end of the divisive, arrogant, and authoritarian tactics of the DEI ethos?
https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/
I agree that blacks, including black women, in the academy and in the media are in one of the bast positions to fight the DEI ethos.
The authorities who mandated DEI could have taken a look at a long-standing precedent, the required statement in officers' periodic evaluations by their superiors. Every one of these documents I had occasion to read complied by including a comment with very slight stylistic variation, "Captain X contributes forcefully to equal opportunity concepts." In my own case, I always thought it meant that I diligently endeavored to secure the conviction of criminal offenders and the maximum authorized sentence, regardless of race, color, creed, sex, or national or ethnic origin. I expect this standard would now be extended, "sex, sexual orientation, or sexual identification", assuming DoD has not adopted the dogma that color blindness is racist.