DEI Bureaucrats Get One-Way Ticket Off Campus

With its closing of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices and mass dismissals of DEI bureaucrats, Texas brings down the curtain on one of the most shameful, expensive, and destructive higher education vanity projects of this century.

This cancerous DEI bureaucracy was imposed on campuses nationwide by radicals who strong-armed cowardly administrations in the summer of 2020. It has since metastasized into a self-reproducing parasitic growth, coupled with demands that “DEI professionals” have access to and influence in every corner of the colleges.

Books have been published, even by erstwhile reputable academics, recommending that the academic freedom of professors be adjudicated by tribunals composed of DEI bureaucrats and fellow-traveler faculty. But now, the reality of this high farce is hitting home with greater emphasis every month.

With resigning college presidents, the reputations of many DEI functionaries sullied by credible charges of academic cheating, the DEI narrative shown utterly incapable of addressing the burgeoning anti-Semitism across the nation’s campuses, DEI is teetering dangerously close to total collapse.

The reality is that DEI has shown itself to be little more than a jobs program for nascent political commissars to insert themselves into areas of the university far above their pay grade and expertise, assuming any expertise at all is involved—and this is a generous assumption. In fact, The New York Post calls DEI a “vast pyramid of con artists.”

As well, the 2020 open door led to a Gold Rush in the non-profit sector as thousands of “diversity consultants” hung out their shingles to squeeze as much largesse from the system as fast as possible while the good times were afoot. The mantra of all of this hullaballoo was and remains to “do the work” of so-called “antiracism.”

But for these apparatchiks, there’s a problem.

There is no work to do on the campuses for these lavishly compensated supernumeraries.

There is no racism on the college campuses worthy of the name, except DEI’s own bold anti-Semitism that is all-but-endorsed by DEI ideology—“decolonization” division.

When called out for its pronouncement that racism was “rampant” at Princeton, more than 300 faculty and staff signatories to the proclamation could not name a single racist incident that had occurred in the previous 15 years.

Without actual campus racism—you must first understand that the DEI apparatchiks don’t even count anti-Semitism as “racism” —the need to concoct a proxy was acute. This absence on the campuses of the very phenomenon that this DEI was crafted to combat has led to one of the most absurd confections ever to enter the gates of academia—the “racial microaggression.”

Originally fabricated by Chester Pierce in the 1970s (see page 265 of Floyd Barbour’s The Black Seventies), the notion of the imaginary microaggression ballooned in subsequent decades as a popular trope under the constant flogging of Columbia Teachers College Professor of Psychology and Education Derald Wing Sue.

Dr. Sue has earned a lucrative living from this confection, which has generated an endless stream of articles and books grounded in confirmation bias. It is surely not insignificant that Sue’s first partner and co-author was the disgraced Madonna Constantine, who was fired from Columbia for plagiarism of her graduate students and an ignominious faking of a “noose” hate crime on campus.

Sue’s latest microaggressions partner is Arizona State University’s Dr. Lisa Spanierman. As a psychologist, Spanierman treads the line of malfeasance as she has called for the psychological manipulation of white students in the classroom to instill artificial guilt in them so that they might be recruited for “social justice” crusading work.

The microaggression is the ultimate tool of those afflicted with paranoid personality disorder. It is birthed in the imaginations of the oppressed, who are actually taught they are oppressed, and it serves the important function of providing the needed racism on campus.

The ideology that sustains DEI derives from paranoia, social fantasy, entitlement, envy, and hate. In the absence of racism, it was perhaps inevitable that the DEI doctrine would amplify the fantasy of microaggression.

What else could the bureaucrats do?

Solicited from students, staff, and even faculty, these microaggressions keep the DEI bureaucracy afloat and create the illusion of activity. Calls for additional staff are often made, and more bureaucrats are regularly hired to suckle at the teat of universities apparently unable to govern themselves with the financial sobriety necessary to stability and continued responsible operation.

That is to say, they evince an inability to stop unnecessary tuition increases that fund higher education’s bloated bureaucracy, increases that have pumped up the total price tag of college to $100,000 per year at some schools.

This desperately needed backlash against out-of-control DEI could not occur soon enough. It is occurring, and it’s accelerating. For instance, a committee at the University of North Carolina system voted on April 17 to repeal its diversity and inclusion policy and replace it with a new “equality within the university” policy that will apply to all 17 universities. A vote by the full board is scheduled for May.

Nonetheless, budgetary inertia will likely keep DEI bureaucracies on life support at colleges for years to come. But mid-range solutions can emasculate the mediocrities and limit damage to students and institutional integrity until the bureaucrats can be rooted out. It’s an unpleasant and necessary recovery from a hangover of the drunken excess of handing the colleges over to purveyors of primitive racialist doctrine.

The only viable solution to mitigate the damage for normal folks is to isolate the bureaucrats and restrict them to conducting campus climate surveys until they leave of their own volition. Thus, vacated, the positions can then be eliminated, and the bureaucracy can quietly and ignominiously dissolve.

And we can bid them good riddance.

Photo by Ryan Conine — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 173075448