The Antidote of Merit, Fairness, and Equality

Why are straight, white, male students completely ignored by the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices at public colleges and universities? There are no initiatives that explicitly encourage or support their success in the year 2023, but it would be very easy to find programs for all other demographic groups. Why exactly are white faculty, staff, and students invited to participate in “Check Your Privilege” workshops on these same taxpayer-funded campuses?

Maybe these less-than students should demand lower tuition, and the non-preferred faculty and staff should demand higher salaries due to the discrimination they face. DEI is nothing more than campus race-and-gender-hustling, and it grows anytime the far-left can find another group of folks who pretend to be oppressed by the straight, white man. It is time to defund, disrupt, and dismantle the massive diversity industrial complex that has penetrated higher education.

Just over three years ago, the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda in academia operated just below detection for many on campus. With the tragic death of George Floyd in May 2020, illiberal (intolerant and neo-Marxist) professors, staff, and students pounced on the opportunity. Professors were abruptly asked by the newly formed ‘Presidential Taskforce on Race’ whether they teach about white supremacy in their courses. The illiberal, intellectually ungifted demagogues extorted financial resources from college and university budgets to grow the DEI-apparatus on campus and placed ‘demands’ on administrations through BLM-activists and other far-left groups. It used to be that activist-professors would espouse ‘critical’ theories in their humanities classes, and that these unproductive ideas would remain in these obscure, parasitic offices on campus. It used to be said that these social justice-believing, American youngsters would be forced to grow up once they graduate, leave campus, and seek employment in the ‘real world.’ However, it now appears that the social justice ideologues have leapt into corporate America as well. One can find these DEI-czars ‘doing the work’ in human resources departments at almost every large corporation.

American Confusion through DEI Newspeak

It’s worth discussing exactly what has happened to the meanings of the words diversity, equity, andinclusion, and why most Americans are willing to accept them as common goals without question. Sadly, Americans haven’t done their due diligence and have been duped by the new meanings of these words. Woke, as it is used here, means an obsession with race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. as the only explanation for why members of preferred groups don’t have the optimal lives that DEI-czars demand. Newspeak is an ideological language of the Left that hijacks a word, redefines it, imbues it with value, and socially polices it. This type of language leads to censorship (self-imposed and external), and has been widely documented on campuses everywhere.

[Related: “Against Merit”]

Diversity, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “a range of many people or things that are very different from each other.” Most people in this country enjoy diverse experiences and interact with people of different backgrounds, especially in a collegiate environment. It now appears that if black Americans don’t make up 13% of every academic discipline and every other part of every college campus, there is a lack of ‘diversity,’ and administrators must create this ‘equal representation’ at all costs. Diversity now means anything non-normative (i.e., non-white, non-male, non-straight, non-masculine, non-Christian, etc.). The woke-folks have assigned value to what was once a value-neutral term. Therefore, if one questions the college administration’s spending on useless diversity initiatives, one gets labeled a bad, immoral person. Dr. Thomas Sowell, a social-theorist and economist at Stanford University, has said that academic hiring committees should select the candidate who uses the word ‘diversity’ the least during the campus visit.

Equity comes from the Latin word aesquitas, which means fairness and equality. But the Left has hijacked this word too. As Kamala Harris has stated, “Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.” For the campus ideologues, equity means equal outcomes—this is impossible if diversity is the goal and individuals make their own choices and choose their own majors. Equity, as it is now understood, has roots in Marxism because the DEI-czars believe they know better than anyone else what one’s needs are. They hide behind the following expression: “we will meet students where they are.” Most folks who work in the DEI industry are mathematically inept and would have no idea how to model constrained optimization and scarcity-of-resource problems (i.e., how to spend limited taxpayer dollars efficiently). However, chief diversity officers promise utopia through equal outcomes and do their best to find any event they can spin into evidence of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. This is all in an effort to stay employed, earn higher administrative salaries than their degrees would have earned otherwise, and further the divisions they have created between faculty, staff, and students.

Inclusion is the third prong of academic wokeism. Only by hiding behind Newspeak would it be possible to exclude straight, white men in the name of ‘inclusion.’ DEI-commissars arrange trainings and affinity groups on college campuses that specifically cater to non-whites and LGBTQ+ folks, for example, but offer no initiatives to further the success of ‘normative’ faculty, staff, and students. Taxpayers should demand ‘straight, white male justice’ as a new initiative on campus or a possible college major. This would be a form of ‘inclusive excellence,’ another one of DEI’s Newspeak terms.

Collaboration between Tenured Professors and Industry to Further MFE

The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), founded in 2007, facilitates the ever-expanding Trojan Horse of DEI. The organization has embedded itself in everything the university does. Two of NADOHE’s current missions are to “advance equity and dismantle systemic oppression.” Its website reads like a manifesto of the progressive Left. All taxpayers are funding these DEI initiatives—it is time to end them and get higher education back to its original telos: the creation and dissemination of knowledge in the pursuit of truth. Colleges and universities have been transformed into social justice centers through DEI offices and other woke administrators. We may very well be witnessing the demise of American academia as standards are lowered in order to accommodate DEI proportionality goals.

[Related: “The Juice is Worth the Squeeze”]

In order to counter this woke agenda, tenured professors need to organize and resist academic administrators, who can quickly lose their current roles and the hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars they earn each year. As tenured professors, we are supposed to question everything, seek the truth, and disseminate knowledge. Why, then, do most of us remain silent in the face of toxic administrations pushing far-left ideology? The DEI-czars and their followers label anyone who dissents as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, fatphobic, ageist, etc. When will the true academics rise up and take the university back? Now would be the perfect time.

A reasonable starting point to counter the DEI demagogues is to organize tenured professors in a National Association of Merit, Fairness, and Equality (NAMFE). These three words will be applied using their true meanings and will not be hijacked like diversity, equity, and inclusion. Most Americans believe that an individual’s merit should be the only thing considered when hiring and promoting an employee, even when this leads to less diversity. Fairness would mean that colleges and universities are impartial and justly treat each individual on his own merits without favoritism. Equality would ensure that schools treat all people equally in admissions, hiring, and promotion. Most Americans, and businesses, should be willing to support NAMFE and its principles of MFE.

NAMFE could hold an annual conference that fosters the bond between academics and industry leaders in pursuit of MFE. The conference would bring in guest speakers who have been ‘canceled’ by their universities/employers, and these folks could provide insight as to how each of us can speak up and out against the DEI-czars and their neo-Marxist followers. In addition, each campus could have a chapter of NAMFE consisting of professors and students. There are far more reasonable professors on campus than the few loud, far-left DEI followers currently making demands and creating division. We just need to organize and unite!

Let’s take our campus and our country back!

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