Religion is a Mental Illness

Opinion | Why Claudine Gay Should Go

Recent, growing revelations about past instances of plagiarism by Harvard’s president make it untenable for her to remain in office.

nytimes.com

Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, should resign.

I don’t love thinking so and hoped we would not reach this tipping point in the controversy over whether she should be retained in her position. But a tipping point it is.

Harvard has a clear policy on plagiarism that threatens undergraduates with punishment up to the university’s equivalent of expulsion for just a single instance of it. That policy may not apply to the university’s president, but the recent, growing revelations about past instances of plagiarism by Dr. Gay make it untenable for her to remain in office.

As a matter of scholarly ethics, academic honor and, perhaps most of all, leadership that sets an example for students, Dr. Gay would be denigrating the values of “veritas” that she and Harvard aspire to uphold. Staying on would not only be a terrible sign of hollowed-out leadership, but also risks conveying the impression of a double standard at a progressive institution for a Black woman, which serves no one well, least of all Dr. Gay.

It has always been inconvenient that Harvard’s first Black president has only published 11 academic articles in her career and not one book (other than one with three co-editors). Some of her predecessors, like Lawrence Bacow, Drew Gilpin Faust and Lawrence Summers, have had vastly more voluminous academic records. The discrepancy gives the appearance that Dr. Gay was not chosen because of her academic or scholarly qualifications, which Harvard is thought to prize, but rather because of her race.

There is an argument that a university president may not need to have been an awesomely productive scholar, and that Dr. Gay perhaps brought other and more useful qualifications to the job. (She held the high-ranking post of dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard before the presidency, and so may have administrative gifts, but that job is not a steppingstone to the modern Harvard presidency.) But Harvard, traditionally, has exemplified the best of the best, and its presidents have been often regarded as among the top in their given fields — prize winners, leading scholars, the total package.

As such, the academic writings and publications of a Harvard president and other top university presidents matter, including the integrity of that work. It might seem counterintuitive that university presidents typically begin their careers writing dozens of academic papers and multiple academic books. One might see their current duties — as administrators, fund-raisers, troubleshooters, meeting-havers — as only diagonally connected to the publish-or-perish realm of being a college professor.

This is especially because the world of academic papers and books is a weird and often gestural thing. Beyond the work of the occasional star, this academic material is often read only by a few reviewers (if even them) and university library shelves groan under the weight of countless academic books engaged by essentially no one. As to one of my own academic books — my favorite one, in fact — I am aware of a single person who has actually read it. And that’s about normal in this business.

But the allegations of plagiarism leveled at Dr. Gay come on top of her thin dossier and present a different kind of challenge.

There are indeed degrees of plagiarism. The allegations against Dr. Gay do not entail promoting actual substantial ideas as her own, but rather lifting phrases for sections of dutiful literature review and explicating basic premises without using quotation marks, or changing the wording only slightly, and, at times, not even citing the relevant authors shortly before or after these sections. This qualifies less as stealing argumentation than as messy. Much has been made of the fact that even her acknowledgments section in her dissertation has phraseology transparently cribbed from those of others. Sloppy, again — but still, this is not about her actual ideas.

But there are two problems here. One is Harvard’s plagiarism policy for students, its veritas image and other standards of integrity and conduct. Second is the sheer amount of the plagiarism in her case, even if in itself it is something less than stealing ideas. If the issue were a couple of hastily quoted phrases in one article, it would be one thing. But investigations have shown that this problem runs through about half of Dr. Gay’s articles, as well as her dissertation. We must ask how a university president can expect to hold her head high, carry authority and inspire respect as a leader on a campus where students suffer grave consequences for doing even a fraction of what Dr. Gay has done.

That Dr. Gay is Black gives this an especially bad look. If she stays in her job, the optics will be that a middling publication record and chronically lackadaisical attention to crediting sources is somehow OK for a university president if she is Black. This implication will be based on a fact sad but impossible to ignore: that it is difficult to identify a white university president with a similar background. Are we to let pass a tacit idea that for Black scholars and administrators, the symbolism of our Blackness, our “diverseness,” is what matters most about us? I am unclear where the Black pride (or antiracism) is in this.

After the congressional hearing this month where Dr. Gay made comments about genocide and antisemitism that she later apologized for, and now in the aftermath of the plagiarism allegations, some of her supporters and others have argued that the university should not dismiss Dr. Gay, because doing so would be to give in to a “mob.” However, one person’s mob is another person’s gradually emerging consensus among reasonable people.

I, for one, wield no pitchfork on this. I did not call for Dr. Gay’s dismissal in the wake of her performance at the antisemitism hearings in Washington, and on social media I advised at first to ease up our judgment about the initial plagiarism accusations. But in the wake of reports of additional acts of plagiarism and Harvard’s saying that she will make further corrections to past writing, the weight of the charges has taken me from “wait and see” to “that’s it.”

If it is mobbish to call on Black figures of influence to be held to the standards that others are held to, then we have arrived at a rather mysterious version of antiracism, and just in time for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in less than a month. I would even wish Harvard well in searching for another Black woman to serve as president if that is an imperative. But at this point that Black woman cannot, with any grace, be Claudine Gay.

And if Harvard declines to dismiss her out of fear of being accused of racism — a reasonable although hardly watertight surmise — Dr. Gay should do the right thing on her own. For Harvard, her own dignity and our national commitment to assessing Black people (and all people) according to the content of their character, she should step down.

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@TheFIREorg: 🧵: In every crisis is an opportunity. As confidence in higher ed reaches historic lows, it is time for campus leaders to re-est

threadreaderapp.com

In every crisis is an opportunity.

As confidence in higher ed reaches historic lows, it is time for campus leaders to re-establish their institutions as communities devoted to the discovery, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge.

Here’s where they should start ⬇️ 

1. Stay true to the college’s mission

The search for knowledge is at the center of higher education’s purpose.

When controversy strikes, institutions must reflect on their truth-seeking mission and use it to ground their response. College leaders who stray from their institution’s mission and try to please everybody, please nobody. 

2. Protect free speech in policy

For knowledge generation to occur, free speech and academic freedom must flourish.

Colleges must cultivate an environment where students and faculty are free to “think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” This freedom is essential to root out error, confirm truth, and establish trust.

Public colleges, as government actors, are bound to protect free speech and academic freedom under the First Amendment, while private colleges should look to the First Amendment’s wisdom in drafting their policies. 

3. Protect free speech in practice

Even institutions that protect free speech and academic freedom in policy too often fail to do so in practice.

When demands for censorship arise, college leaders must remind their campus community that free speech is essential to the mission of the college. When leaders do this loudly, clearly, early, and consistently, censorship demands dissipate.

When leaders fail to do so — or when they give into demands for censorship — the demands grow and future calls for censorship are incentivized. 

4. Adopt institutional neutrality

College administrations and departments should not adopt institutional positions on contentious social and political issues.

When colleges adopt official institutional positions on issues outside their mission, they risk establishing a campus orthodoxy that chills speech and undermines the knowledge-generating process.

By not tethering itself to a particular position, on the other hand, the neutral college welcomes the fullest range of views — and reaps the benefit of the wisdom produced by the resulting debate. As the @UChicago's “Kalven Report” puts it, “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. 

5. Center free speech values in hiring and admissions

Student and faculty applicants must understand that practicing and defending scholarly values is central to a college’s mission.

Curiosity, dissent, devil’s advocacy, thought experimentation, and talking across lines of difference are all essential to a liberal arts education. Institutions should clearly explain and prioritize these values in the hiring and admissions processes so there is not a mismatch between expectations and the reality of a liberal education. 

6. Teach a scholarly mindset from day one

Colleges must inspire students to be scholars and teach scholarly values from the moment they arrive on campus.

Students must take seriously the possibility that at any moment, and on any matter, their understanding of the world might be wrong.

Censorship assumes certainty, whereas free speech, academic freedom, and open inquiry allows for the discovery of our own ignorance and enables the project of human knowledge to succeed. Colleges should teach this scholarly mindset throughout a student’s time on campus. 

7. Prohibit disruptive and violent conduct

Disruptive conduct is often used to enforce orthodoxy and punish dissent on campus.

Violence, shout-downs, vandalism, classroom occupations, and blocking passageways are all examples of unprotected conduct that threatens an institution’s values of free inquiry.

Too often such behavior goes uninvestigated and unpunished — or is even encouraged by college administrators. Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. Colleges must have the greatest tolerance for opinion and no tolerance for violence. 

8. Eliminate political litmus tests

Rules that force an individual “to declare a belief” and “to utter what is not in his mind” serve to “strangle the free mind at its source.”

In recent years, colleges have required faculty and students to demonstrate their commitment to politicized concepts of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” These requirements too easily function as ideological litmus tests that threaten enrollment, employment, and advancement opportunities for those who dissent from prevailing views.

Attempts to require fealty to any given ideology or political commitment — whether “patriotism” or “social justice” — should not take root at any college committed to expressive freedom. 

9. Collect data on the campus climate

Leaders of scholarly institutions should not simply guess whether their campus reflects the values their institution wishes to inculcate.

As a community of scholars, colleges are uniquely capable of collecting data using quantitative and qualitative measures — including through surveys, focus groups, and other means — to ensure all within the community feel free to inquire, speak, and learn. 

10. Cut administrative bloat

Students and faculty are the lifeblood of a college’s intellectual mission. But, in recent years, the administrative class has ballooned.

Administrators now outnumber full-time faculty at America’s colleges and universities. At Harvard, there are 1.35 administrators for every one student. When colleges act more like giant corporations and less like educational institutions, student and faculty rights suffer. Massive administrative bureaucracies lead to initiatives that undermine and distract from a college’s core mission and result in violations of free speech and academic freedom rights. 

As colleges and universities look to regain trust, their leaders should recommit to their institutions’ core values. They can start with these 10 common-sense reforms. FIRE stands ready to assist in any way we can! 🔥

For College Administrators

FIRE’s works with college administrators to evaluate and revise free speech policies and disciplinary procedures to foster free expression o

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Why I Don't Need Your Diversity Training

Black employees want normal relations with their colleagues, not perpetual grievance struggles

theequianoproject.substack.com

In a recent Equiano Project podcast featuring Helen Pluckrose, Helen talked about the perpetuation of racial essentialism and stereotype training. I feel comfortable referring to Helen by her first name in that I have known her since my days with Counterweight and given her early support for my book, Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America (co-authored with Jennifer Richmond).

Helen is the author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (co-authored with James Lindsey). Cynical Theories may well be the most prophetic book about the dangers of racial dogma in the past decade. Helen’s interview landed well with respect to the dark underbelly of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training.

The most important fire bell in the night shared by Helen is that people write things they do not believe. The ability to write and publish a book is a privilege, and a blessing. Less than 1 percent of Americans have published a book. As one user on Reddit calculates, the number of humans who have published a manuscript is far less than 1 percent. “Well, 6 million books on Amazon, which includes a big chunk of the self published authors, divided by 7 billion people and you get .0086%. So a lot less than 1%.”

Why does writing falsehoods pose a problem for society? When one writes a lie in print, one is reducing the sacred trust between a reader and a writer. Reality becomes distorted for the writer who must suppress the truth and for the reader who doesn’t recognise reality on the printed page. For example, someone might write that incarceration of black men is the new Jim Crow. That assertion is a falsehood. Jim Crow was a legally mandated system of laws to segregate blacks and whites in the public sphere. Incarceration occurs because someone commits a crime. Incarceration does not equal Jim Crow. But once the lie is seized upon in public discourse, people begin to live in lies and to not see the truth; i.e. criminals are incarcerated because criminals commit crimes. 

I no longer believe anything authored by writer Michelle Alexander. She has abused her sacred opportunity as a privileged writer by bringing into the world a monumental falsehood, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. We have all suffered and been injured by her distortion of truth and reality. But for Alexander’s fictional argument, the fertile groundwork might not have been present for the rise of another falsehood, Black Lives Matter. Sadly, one falsehood leads to another falsehood and so it goes.

It is the duty of a published writer to write the truth. 

The next powerful insight from Helen was this idea that DEI training causes racial minorities to assess the level of racism as higher than it should be. Doesn’t this bad consequence ring true? Berry Gordy, the heroic founder of Motown in the year 1959, was once asked the reason for his success. Without hesitation, Gordy answered the reason was “focus.” This psychology applies to Gordy and, indeed, every ordinary human. If you focus on the positive, you will welcome the positive into your life. If you can only look at the negative, one invites the negative into one’s life. The divisive structure of DEI programs prompts participants to dredge up instances and examples of racism, no matter how remote or distant or of little consequence in one’s life.

If I were in a DEI program and the trainer asked me to name three examples of racism from my life when I felt oppressed, sure, I could search my memory banks and come up with three examples. Every black person could in the Western World. But having done so, the trainer has now implanted in my mind resentment and suspicion and ill-will towards my white colleagues. Such a poisonous outcome and for what purpose other than to raise race consciousness in the minds of work colleagues? It is a shame we enable these types of corrosive trainings. 

Finally, Helen channelled the opinions of many black employees who have had enough! Around 60% of the people who reached out to Counterweight for help were black. They pleaded with Helen to stop the racialising at work. Black employees want normal relations with their colleagues, not perpetual grievance struggles about how oppressed one is and how evil oppressor white colleagues are. We should listen to these black employees who don’t like anti-racism programs, Professor Ibram X. Kendi, and all of the manipulative slogan words in the office nowadays. 

Let people work together, lunch together and laugh together. DEI training should be discarded as an unworkable scheme that does more harm than good.

Bari Weiss on Why We Should End DEI

It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.

Tablet Magazine

It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.

Twenty years ago, when I was a college student, I started writing about a then-nameless, niche ideology that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.

It is possible I would not have perceived the nature of this ideology—or rather, I would have been able to avoid seeing its true nature—had I not been a Jew. But I was. I am. And in noticing the way I had been written out of the equation, I started to notice that it wasn’t just me, but that the whole system rested on an illusion.

What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Colorblindness with race-obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as Jamie Kirchick concisely put it in these pages: “Muslim > gay, Black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”

I was an undergraduate back then, but you didn’t need a Ph.D. to see where this could go. And so I watched, in horror, sounding alarms as loudly as I could. I was told by most Jewish leaders that, yes, it wasn’t great, but not to be so hysterical. Campuses were always hotbeds of radicalism, they said. This ideology, they promised, would surely dissipate as young people made their way in the world.

It did not.

Over the past two decades, I saw this inverting worldview swallow all of the crucial sense-making institutions of American life. It started with the universities. Then it moved on to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. Then on to our medical schools and our law schools. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. The takeover is so comprehensive that it’s now almost hard to notice it—because it is everywhere.

Including in the Jewish community.

Some of the most important Jewish communal organizations transformed themselves in order to prop up this ideology. Or at the very least, they contorted themselves to signal that they could be good allies in the fight for equal rights—even as those rights are no longer presumed inalienable or equal, and are handed out rather than protected.

For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are 2% of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.

It isn’t only Jews who suffer from the suggestion that merit and excellence are dirty words. It is strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class. That is why Asian American success, for example, is suspicious. The percentages are off. The scores are too high. From whom did you steal all that success?

Of course this new ideology doesn’t come right out and say all that. It doesn’t even like to be named. Some call it wokeness or anti-racism or progressivism or safetyism or critical social justice or identity-Marxism. But whatever term you use, what’s clear is that it has gained power in a conceptual instrument called “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI.

In theory, all three of these words represent noble causes. They are in fact all causes to which American Jews in particular have long been devoted, both individually and collectively. But in reality, these words are now metaphors for an ideological movement bent on recategorizing every American not as an individual, but as an avatar of an identity group, his or her behavior prejudged accordingly, setting all of us up in a kind of zero-sum game.

We have been seeing for several years now the damage this ideology has done: DEI, and its cadres of enforcers, undermine the central missions of the institutions that adopt it. But nothing has made the dangers of DEI more clear than what’s happening these days on our college campuses—the places where our future leaders are nurtured.

It is there that professors are compelled to pledge fidelity to DEI in order to get hired, promoted, or tenured. (For more on this, please read John Sailer’s Free Press piece: "How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities.”) And it is there that the hideousness of this worldview has been on full display over the past few weeks: We see students and professors, immersed not in facts, knowledge, and history, but in a dehumanizing ideology that has led them to celebrate or justify terrorism.

Jews, who understand that being made in the image of God bestows inviolate sanctity on every human life, must not stand by as that principle, so central to the promise of this country and its hard won freedoms, is erased.

What we must do is reverse this.

The answer is not for the Jewish community to plead its cause before the intersectional coalition, or beg for a higher ranking in the new ladder of victimhood. That is a losing strategy—not just for Jewish dignity, but for the values we hold as Jews and as Americans.

The Jewish commitment to justice—and the American Jewish community’s powerful and historic opposition to racism—is a source of tremendous pride. That should never waver. Nor should our commitment to stand by our friends, especially when they need our support as we now need theirs.

But “DEI” is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power.

And the movement that is gathering all this power does not like America or liberalism. It does not believe that America is a good country—at least no better than China or Iran. It calls itself progressive, but it does not believe in progress; it is explicitly anti-growth. It claims to promote “equity,” but its answer to the challenge of teaching math or reading to disadvantaged children is to eliminate math and reading tests. It demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual.

An ideology that pathologizes these fundamental human virtues is one that seeks to undermine what makes America exceptional.

It is time to end DEI for good. No more standing by as people are encouraged to segregate themselves. No more forced declarations that you will prioritize identity over excellence. No more compelled speech. No more going along with little lies for the sake of being polite.

The Jewish people have outlived every single regime and ideology that has sought our elimination. We will persist, one way or another. But DEI is undermining America, and that for which it stands—including the principles that have made it a place of unparalleled opportunity, safety, and freedom for so many. Fighting it is the least we owe this country.

Whether Ibram X Kendi wasted millions is not the point

The author’s misguided ideas matter more than the inquiry into his Center for Antiracist Research.

New Statesman

An “inquiry” has been launched by Boston University into its Center for Antiracist Research, which was founded and directed by the author and historian Ibram X Kendi. In an official statement in response to internal complaints of gross incompetence, poor management and a failure to deliver on explicit promises, a Boston University (BU) spokesperson wrote: “Complaints focused on the Center’s culture and its grant management practices. We previously initiated an examination of those grant management practices and that will continue. Based on additional information provided… we are expanding our inquiry to include the Center’s management culture and the faculty and staff’s experience with it.”

Despite taking in tens of millions of dollars, Kendi’s centre has produced practically nothing of substance. Reportedly half of the centre’s employees were also laid off this month. In a statement Kendi said, “We are doing our best to support our affected colleagues during this difficult time of transition” and that he welcomes the inquiry into the centre’s operations.

In spite of BU’s tepid response, the accusations against Kendi are extremely serious and in any normal circumstance would be career-ending, though we should extend him grace until the university’s investigation is complete. But there is a far deeper issue here. In this nasty culture war, each side is looking for a totalising victory, no matter how pyrrhic. This is a mistake.

As someone who has criticised Kendi’s unique brand of toxic divisiveness – and the sycophantic media that has actively supported his work – here is what I believe we must focus on: Kendi’s ideas, anti-racism among those, must be addressed independently of any accusations of mismanagement. Whether or not BU’s investigation finds Kendi incompetent we must be open to the idea that Kendi could still be correct about anti-racism being the way to solve our racial ills.

It is essential that we continue to look at the evidence, especially given that both Kendi’s supporters and his detractors consider the other to be an existential threat. This is understandable, considering the pain the US has endured since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 – mass riots; increases in crime and murder rates, especially among African Americans; wholesale ideological capture of nearly every major US governmental and economic institution; and the undermining of legitimacy in virtually all legacy institutions, from the New York Times to universities to the academic peer-review system, the American Civil Liberties Union, and popular magazines such as Scientific American and even GQ.

But now we have an opportunity to grow up. We can sit at the adult table and have honest, evidence-based discussions about the issues Kendi is trying to address: how should we solve literacy disparities between African Americans and other racial groups? Is equity – redistribution based upon historical oppression – the best way to address economic disparities? Is every disparity in outcome due to systemic racism? Is racism the ordinary, everyday state of affairs? What role, if any, should anti-racism play in our government and in our institutions? Is, as Kendi writes, “the only remedy to past discrimination… present discrimination [and] the only remedy to present discrimination… future discrimination?” Should diversity and “proportional representation” be a goal in university admissions?

If we want to construct the kind of society that delivers on the American promise of equal opportunity to all citizens, regardless of race, then the solutions proposed by Kendi and those in his ideological orbit must be addressed, separately from any alleged professional misconduct. If we fail in this, and Kendi’s prescriptions are correct, then we have consigned our fellow Americans to further misery and despair because we have been captured by ideology.

Fortunately, there is a mountain of quality scholarship arguing against Kendi’s anti-racist nostrums from across the political spectrum. Jason D Hill, Heather Mac Donald, John McWhorter, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Wilfred Reilly, Thomas Sowell and others have addressed and dismantled Kendi’s various arguments. Even in their totality, however, this is insufficient to disrupt the social and political infrastructure – from bias response teams to offices of diversity, equity and inclusion (or DEI) – that Kendi and his fellow anti-racists have helped to institutionalise in all domains of American life.

The solution to anti-racism’s institutional capture is not to ignore the intellectual work that has already been done. Allegations against Kendi should not be used as an excuse to simply write off his arguments. Instead, the solution is to understand why, for instance, culture is a valid explanation for literacy disparities among African Americans and Asians, and why discrimination against one racial group because of the sins of their fathers (through, say, reparations) is not the way forward. Until we digest this intellectual work and inform ourselves through the best available evidence and arguments, we will have little chance of dismantling programmes and public policies that were intended to help our fellow citizens, but have instead left them aggrieved, impoverished and immiserated.

LAWSUIT: FIRE sues to stop California from forcing professors to teach DEI

The California Community Colleges’ regulations force professors within the California Community College system to espouse controversial view

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

• The California Community Colleges’ regulations force professors to espouse controversial views about “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”  • FIRE filed a lawsuit after the chancellor’s office ignored our warning that the regulations violated professors’ First Amendment rights. • The regulations dictate how professors teach the approximately 1.8 million students enrolled in California community colleges.

FRESNO, Aug. 17, 2023 — Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching. 

The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints.

“I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction?” asked Reedley College professor Bill Blanken. “What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”

“These regulations are a totalitarian triple-whammy,” said FIRE attorney Daniel Ortner. “The government is forcing professors to teach and preach a politicized viewpoint they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary, indiscernible line.”

DEI requirements are controversial within academia. FIRE’s research indicates that half of professors believe mandatory diversity statements violate academic freedom. The sole mention of academic freedom in California’s model framework frames it an inconvenience, warning professors not to “‘weaponize’ academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students.”

“Hearing uncomfortable ideas is not ‘curricular trauma,’ and teaching all sides of an issue is not ‘weaponizing’ academic freedom,” said Loren Palsgaard, a professor of English at Madera Community College and a plaintiff in the suit. “That’s just called ‘education.’”

An official glossary of terms released by the state makes plain that the “anti-racist” views it mandates are highly ideological. Indeed, the definition for “anti-racism” states that “persons that say they are ‘not a racist’ are in denial.” California declares that “color-blindness,” or the belief that “the best way to end prejudice and discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity,” is itself a problem because it “perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.”

Even a professor saying something as benign as “I grade my class based on merit” is suspect under the regulations. “Merit is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race-based structural inequality,” the glossary claims. “Merit protects White privilege under the guise of standards … and as highlighted by anti-affirmative action forces.”

FIRE first expressed concerns with the California regulations when they were proposed in 2022, warning in a public comment that the new rules would “unconstitutionally require faculty to profess allegiance to and to promote a contested set of ideological views.” The response from the chancellor’s office was woefully inadequate, denying that the chancellor or the board of governors could ever violate a professor’s academic freedom. The regulations are now in effect in the State Center Community College District, and FIRE’s clients have already been forced to change their syllabi and teaching materials, lest they face repercussions.

FIRE’s California suit comes almost a year after FIRE filed a lawsuit against Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” as it applies to college classrooms. In that case, Florida’s legislature, like California Community Colleges, sought to dictate what views public university professors can express when teaching. In November 2022, a federal court granted FIRE’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the Stop WOKE Act, calling it “positively dystopian.” 

“Whether it’s states forcing professors to teach DEI concepts or states forcing them not to teach concepts that lawmakers deem ‘woke,’ the government can’t tell university professors what views they are or aren’t allowed to debate in the classroom,” said FIRE attorney Jessie Appleby. FIRE is representing professors James Druley, David Richardson, Linda de Morales, and Loren Palsgaard of Madera Community College, Bill Blanken of Reedley College, and Michael Stannard of Clovis Community College. The defendants are California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian, the State Board of Governors, State Center Community College District Chancellor Carole Goldsmith, and the District Board of Trustees.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE recognizes that colleges and universities play a vital role in preserving free thought within a free society. To this end, we place a special emphasis on defending the individual rights of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience.

Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.”

COMMENTARY: On DEI’s many contradictory concepts

Public fatigue is beginning to show.

Las Vegas Review-Journal

Once wildly popular, the sweeping Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement is starting to crash and burn.

Even companies that championed DEI initiatives in the aftermath of the George Floyd case in 2020 are now changing their tune. In the past month, leading entertainment companies — including Warner Bros, Netflix and Disney — have all fired their DEI executives.

To understand this stunning reversal, look no further than the contradictory and often illogical concepts at the heart of DEI.

Proponents of DEI claim that diversity promotes “learning.” Queens University, for example, argues that a diverse student body “promotes creativity, as well as better education, as those with differing viewpoints are able to collaborate to create solutions.”

One could find these claims more believable if those who support DEI did not also claim that students learn better when the teacher “looks like them.” If diversity enables us to learn better, why do students of color learn best with professors of the same race?

Claims of racist behavior often include contradictory charges, even in medicine.

One allegation is the claim that pregnant Black women receive inferior medical treatment. For example, The New York Times recently reported that Black women are given epidurals for pain more often than white women. The same article claimed that Black women “described having their pain dismissed,” leading readers to wonder how Black women receiving too much pain medication also means their pain is ignored.

The Association for American Medical Colleges contends that “research shows that racial concordance can improve communication, trust and adherence to medical advice.” Yet, if a white patient chose not to see a Black doctor based on his race, it would clearly — and appropriately — be called racism.

The contradictions continue in culture and entertainment. Look no further than the diversity-obsessed Hollywood. Today, if a white actor is cast to play a non-“white” role, critics complain the film is “whitewashed.” Meanwhile, shows and movies featuring people of color depicting historically white characters are lauded for their diversity.

There are no cries for diversity in pro basketball, where 73 percent of the players are Black, while the NHL is accused of racism because 84 percent of its players are white.

Ditto for jazz musicians, who are predominantly Black, versus their classical counterparts, who are mostly white.

The dilemma extends to enjoying other cultures in everyday life. There was a time in America when we proudly enjoyed foods, dress and traditions of many cultures but those who do so today risk being condemned for cultural appropriation.

Ibram X. Kendi, a leading proponent of DEI, famously said: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.” His description underlines the self-serving nature of the DEI philosophy. After all, “white guilt” can be monetized and leveraged to give certain minorities an advantage.

Fortunately, public fatigue for DEI is beginning to show, from corporate America increasingly ditching DEI to the Supreme Court ruling ending affirmative action.

However, we will have a long way to go to restore a merit-based society in which all Americans can enjoy equal freedom and opportunities. With the contradictions inherent in today’s DEI framework, it’s only a matter of time.

Education Law in the Post-Affirmative Action Era

Today, it remains to be seen whether schools will incorporate the holdings in SFFA and 303 Creative more speedily or more deliberately. Time

fairforall.substack.com

The striking down of affirmative action in college admissions marks the end of one era, but it might be the beginning of a new round of litigation on race discrimination in schools.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (“SFFA”), the Supreme Court found that the admissions programs of both Harvard College and the University of North Carolina failed multiple tests of constitutionality. They “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints.”

The principles that the Court fortified in its opinion extend beyond college admissions and implicate educational institutions at all levels, at least public institutions and those that receive federal financial assistance. The pronouncement in SFFA is as sweeping as it is explicit: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Given the breadth of the principle and the clarity with which the Court expressed it, the amount of activity currently taking place in schools that is almost certainly illegal is staggering. Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion noted a study that showed, “43% of colleges offered segregated housing to students of different races, 46% offered segregated orientation programs, and 72% spon.sored segregated graduation ceremonies.”  It is difficult to see how any of these practices would pass muster under the rules stated in SFFA.

Similar acts of segregation and discrimination are occurring at the elementary and secondary levels, as well. The form and manner of such programs vary, and the euphemistic neologisms used to describe them proliferate. But SFFA has rendered presumptively invalid any lessons, activities, assemblies, meeting groups, working groups, or other school-sanctioned events where attendees are separated by race or where some races are invited while others are excluded. 

Educational institutions might attempt to design programs to meet the strict scrutiny standard applied in SFFA. Some might view the Court’s admonition that racial classifications must have a “most exact connection” with “an exceedingly persuasive justification that is measurable and concrete enough to permit judicial review” as a kind of challenge.  If there is any space in that needle, however, passing a thread through it might prove to be prohibitively tough.  

What is certain is that the justifications offered by the colleges in SFFA fell far from the mark. To put it mildly, the Court was unimpressed with diversity goals such as “adapt[ing] to an increasingly pluralistic society”; “better educating . . . through diversity”; and “enhancing appreciation, respect, and empathy, cross-racial understanding, and breaking down stereotypes.” Not that such goals are not laudable; the problem is that they are too abstract and subjective for courts of law. To persist on their equity projects, schools would have to imagine a whole new set of justifications that can be objectively measured and can withstand strict scrutiny. Complicating matters, groups are now contemplating disparate impact challenges to legacy admissions. It might be a better use of resources just to stop discriminating.

Another decision that the Court issued the day after SFFA calls into question related practices in higher education. In 303 Creative, LLC v. Elenis, the Court held that the government cannot, through the application of anti-discrimination statutes, compel or coerce a website designer to create sites for same-sex weddings where such weddings contravene the designer’s religious beliefs. The general principle of 303 Creative is that “the government may not compel a person to speak its own preferred messages.”  The Constitution does not tolerate forcing speakers to choose among “remaining silent, producing speech that violates their beliefs, or speaking their minds and incurring sanctions for doing so.”

303 Creative casts doubt on the legality of the practice by colleges and universities of requiring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) statements from applicants for academic positions. Not everyone who seeks employment with or admission to an institution of higher learning will agree with the orthodox opinion on campus. Those who are confronted with writing DEI statements as part of their applications will face the choice of remaining silent, producing speech that violates their beliefs, or speaking their minds and being denied a position. Legal challenges to this practice should be expected.

Adverse employment actions against faculty who oppose DEI dogma make even easier cases. Black professor Tabia Lee was fired by a community college in California for transgressions including: questioning antiracist ‘orthodoxy,’ seeking accuracy in the college’s land acknowledgments, trying to bring a ‘Jewish inclusion’ event to campus, declining to join a ‘socialist network,’ refusing to use the terms ‘Latinx’ and ‘Filipinx,’ and inquiring why the word ‘Black’ was capitalized but not ‘white.’ The college has asserted its reasons for her firing, and the case is being litigated. If Doctor Lee’s perspective on her case is at all accurate, then her treatment was profoundly unconstitutional.

Ironically, the colorblind aspiration that the Court has endorsed is practically unspeakable in some academic circles. We at FAIR have seen public school lessons where statements like, “There’s only one human race,” and concepts including “Meritocracy Myth” are taught to be “covert white supremacy.” The same lessons use the term “Whiteness” as a pejorative. Instruction of that type seems to offend the principles laid out in SFFA.

At some point, legal questions dissolve into policy disputes that are not appropriate for litigation. “May a high school require history teachers to assign ‘anti-racist’ readings?” is importantly distinct from the question of whether it should do so. However, the fundamental issue that SFFA and 303 Creative address, whether students can be separated into racial affinity groups in order to study such readings, seems more clearly unconstitutional.

The decisions in SFFA and 303 Creative bring clarity where any questions about racial classifications or compelled speech might have lingered. The ball is now in the court of the educational institutions—both public schools, which are bound by the Constitution, and any other schools receiving federal funding, which are subject to the same standards under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.  

A year after the Supreme Court held, in Brown v. Board, that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, the case returned to the Court on the issue of remedies. At that time, the Court directed public schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”  Even after that directive, desegregation litigation carried on for decades. Today, it remains to be seen whether schools will incorporate the holdings in SFFA and 303 Creative more speedily or more deliberately. Time will tell, and school attorneys are watching.

The Rise and Fall of the Chief Diversity Officer

“Everything is a battle.” Diversity executives hit the exits as company priorities shift.

WSJ

Two years ago chief diversity officers were some of the hottest hires into executive ranks. Now, they increasingly feel left out in the cold.

Companies including Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs. Thousands of diversity-focused workers have been laid off since last year, and some companies are scaling back racial justice commitments.

Diversity, equity and inclusion—or DEI—jobs were put in the crosshairs after many companies started re-examining their executive ranks during the tech sector’s shake out last fall. Some chief diversity officers say their work is facing additional scrutiny since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions and companies brace for potential legal challenges. DEI work has also become a political target.

“There’s a combination of grief, being very tired, and being, in some cases, overwhelmed,” says Miriam Warren, chief diversity officer for Yelp, of the challenges facing executives in the field.

In interviews, current and former chief diversity officers said company executives at times didn’t want to change hiring or promotion processes, despite initially telling CDOs they were hired to improve the talent pipeline. The quick about-face shows company enthusiasm for diversity initiatives hasn’t always proved durable, leaving some diversity officers now questioning their career path. 

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in police custody in May 2020, companies scrambled to hire chief diversity officers, changing the face of the C-suite. In 2018, less than half the companies in the S&P 500 employed someone in the role, and by 2022 three out four companies had created a position, according to a study from Russell Reynolds, an executive search firm. 

Once mostly tasked with HR matters, today’s diversity leaders are expected to weigh in on new product development, marketing efforts and current events that have an impact on how workers and consumers are feeling. Warren and other CDOs said the expanded remit is playing out in a politically divided environment where corporate diversity efforts are the subject of frequent social-media firestorms. 

Falling demand

New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer. 

“I got to 300 applications and then I stopped tracking,” says Stephanie Lubin, who was laid off from her role as diversity head at Drizly, an online alcohol marketplace, in May following the company’s acquisition by Uber. In one case, Lubin says she went through 16 rounds of interviews for a role she didn’t get, and says she is now planning to pivot out of DEI work.

The number of CDO searches is down 75% in the past year, says Jason Hanold, chief executive of Hanold Associates Executive Search, which works with Fortune 100 companies to recruit HR and DEI executives, among other roles. Demand is the lowest he has seen in his 30 years of recruiting.

At the same time, he says, more executives are feeling skittish about taking on diversity roles.

“They’re telling us, the only way I want to go into another role with DEI is if it includes something else,” he says of the requests for broader titles that offer more responsibilities and resources. He estimates that 60% of diversity roles he is currently filling combine the title with another position, such as chief human resources officer, up from about 10% five years ago.

During the pandemic, some companies moved people into diversity leadership if they were an ethnic minority, says Dani Monroe, even when they weren’t qualified. Monroe served as CDO for Mass General Brigham, a Boston-based hospital system and one of the largest employers in the state, until 2021 and convenes a yearly gathering of more than 100 CDOs.

“These were knee-jerk reactions,” she says of the hurried CDO hires, adding that some of those elevations didn’t create much impact, leaving both sides feeling disillusioned.

On-the-job obstruction 

American workers are split on the importance of a diverse workforce, surveys find. 

Diversity chiefs also encounter obstruction from top executives, says Melinda Starbird, a human resources and diversity executive who has worked at AT&T, Starbucks and OfferUp, an online marketplace. Leaders sometimes associate diversity efforts with mandates, such as the equal-employment rules that apply to federal contractors. Those requirements for compliance can create executive resistance that bleeds over into other cultural or policy shifts, such as adding Juneteenth as a company holiday, she says. 

“Even if you report to the CEO, it’s still a battle and it’s a smaller budget,” says Starbird, who was laid off from OfferUp in November during a broader restructuring. 

Many diversity executives feel a lack of buy-in from their colleagues. In a survey of 138 diversity executives conducted this spring by World 50 Group, a networking organization for corporate leaders, 82% said they had sufficient influence to do their job, down 6 percentage points from 2022. Asked if they felt supported by middle managers, 41% said yes, an 8-percentage-point drop.

Since the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in June, companies are anticipating spillover legal action could have an impact on them. Those that are still hiring CDOs want people who can help the board navigate the political and legal landscape of diversity work and figure out how to take defensive moves to shield them from litigation, says Tina Shah Paikeday, global leader of Russell Reynolds’s diversity, equity and inclusion practice. 

“They recognize it would be smart to get ahead of that.”

People are more resistant to company-backed efforts to advance diversity when they are worried about their own jobs, whether because of impending layoffs or disruptions from AI, says David Kenny, chief executive of Nielsen, the media-ratings company. 

Kenny was both CEO and CDO for a time, taking on the diversity role to emphasize how important it was to the future of the business. Even as CEO, it could be a tough sell. Efforts to restructure compensation to make it more equitable created a backlash.

“A lot of it is, ‘I’m losing my slice of the pie,’ ” he says.

For DEI Supporters, Perpetuation of Racism Is Good Business | National Review

The apparent goal of contemporary anti-racism activism — which is not the activism of the civil-rights era — is not to end racism but to per

National Review

The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

Between September 2019 and September 2020, Indeed job postings in diversity, inclusion and belonging have risen 56.3% — from 140 jobs per million to 219. More significantly, after the U.S. economy declined in Spring 2020, the DI&B industry recovered quickly, with job postings rising by an astonishing 123% between May and September.

[As] we know from the war on drugs and the war on terror, for those in the business of providing protection, high threat levels are bread and butter. Likewise, for those in the business of healing race relations, racial division is your sworn enemy but your secret friend—so much so that wounding and healing become part of the same operation.

Are Diversity Statements Illegal?

Legal experts are divided. A new lawsuit may provide clarity.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

As a growing number of colleges around the country have stopped using diversity statements, a lawsuit filed against the University of California system in May appears to be the first to directly challenge their legality. Experts are divided on whether the use of such statements by public colleges will pass legal muster.

John D. Haltigan, the plaintiff, is being represented pro bono by the nonprofit Pacific Legal Foundation. He is arguing that the University of California system’s use of diversity statements in hiring violates the First Amendment and represents unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Haltigan wants to apply for a tenure-track position in the psychology department at the University of California at Santa Cruz and is asking the court, among other things, for an injunction that would allow him to apply without submitting a diversity statement. The university system has required diversity statements in applications for tenure-track positions and promotions since 2018.

Haltigan describes diversity statements as modern-day loyalty oaths, comparing them to the anti-Communist pledges demanded of faculty members during the McCarthy era — a particularly sensitive topic at the University of California, which was notorious for firing professors over the pledges.

Haltigan argues that his commitment to colorblindness and viewpoint diversity, his objections to diversity, equity, and inclusion “ orthodoxy,” and his belief that a person should be considered based solely on individual merit mean he cannot compete for the Santa Cruz job. He referred a request for comment to his lawyers but posted on a blog in February that he believes “the DEI rubric in the academy has … contributed to creating a corrosive and hostile environment that is intolerant of viewpoint diversity and is anathema to high-quality research and teaching.”

The blog post includes a passage he wrote in response to the diversity-statement portion of the job application. He wrote that he has served as a mentor to “several students from underrepresented minority groups” and described how his previous research, “published in Child Development, provided insight into how the legacy of economic hardship may, in conjunction with biological and genetic factors, contribute to different stylistic ways of talking about early-life-attachment experiences among African American pregnant women.” The Pacific Legal Foundation has been seeking a plaintiff to challenge diversity statements for years and connected with Haltigan after his blog post was published.

Diversity statements typically ask job applicants — or employees seeking promotion or tenure — to discuss how they can contribute to a college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. Supporters say the statements allow colleges to take relevant skills and experience into account as they seek to recruit and retain a diverse student body, a challenge that has grown increasingly critical as the nation’s demographics shift and many institutions battle shrinking enrollments.

Diversity statements have been used in higher education for nearly a decade, but they took off after the murder of George Floyd. In recent months a handful of states, universities, and state university systems dropped them, typically citing concerns about academic freedom. Lawmakers in 10 states have filed bills to ban colleges from using diversity statements, according to the Chronicle’s database of legislation to restrict DEI efforts in higher education.

Public universities have a First Amendment right to have their own values and mission statements, said Zach Greenberg, a senior program officer with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has warned that diversity statements could be used as political litmus tests. But colleges may not force students or faculty members to adhere to values and mission statements, Greenberg said, “if they’re in political terms.”

“So, a university may say that we are antiracist, we believe in DEI, but we also welcome those with opposing views,” Greenberg said. A university can even encourage faculty to share those views, as long as it doesn’t cross the line into compelling them, he said.

While private employers are generally allowed to practice viewpoint discrimination, public universities, like other public employers, typically cannot discriminate based on political beliefs. “A public university can’t require its faculty to have certain beliefs,” said Brian Leiter, a professor of jurisprudence and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago, who has been a vocal critic of diversity statements. “No matter how laudable one thinks the beliefs are, it’s not allowed. And that’s just true of any public employer. There are very narrow exceptions.” Courts have ruled that government can base hiring decisions on political viewpoints only in very limited cases, such as political appointments, Leiter added.

But do diversity statements require a particular political viewpoint? Keith E. Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University, said that diversity statements, as they are commonly used in academe, “definitely run afoul of these kinds of viewpoint discrimination concerns.” For example, Whittington pointed to evaluation rubrics from the University of California system that downgrade applicants who say they treat every student equally. The rubric used by the University of California at Santa Cruz, for example, gives applicants less credit if they describe “only activities that are already the expectation of our faculty such as mentoring, treating all students the same regardless of background, etc.”

“There’s a real tendency to want to extrapolate from people’s political views, that may be publicly expressed, to make inferences about how they might treat students in the classroom,” said Whittington, who also serves on the academic committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group of faculty members who seek to uphold academic freedom, which has urged colleges to stop requiring diversity statements.

Brian Soucek, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis, has argued that diversity statements can be constitutional, if used correctly. He previously served as chair of a systemwide committee on academic freedom for the University of California that provided input for the university system’s latest recommendations on the use of DEI statements.

Soucek recommends that in order to avoid infringing on academic freedom, faculty members, rather than administrators, should determine how to judge applicants. In order to avoid comparisons to loyalty oaths, he recommends that colleges ask what applicants “have done or plan to do, not what they believe, when it comes to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in their field.”

And regarding viewpoint discrimination, Soucek argues that the central question is not whether applicants are being judged on their viewpoints, but whether those perspectives are relevant to the position in question. An immigration-asylum clinic, for example, could legitimately ask about an applicant’s views on immigration, Soucek said, but it would appear to be constitutionally problematic if a law school asked an applicant for a bankruptcy professor position about immigration.

In Haltigan’s case, Soucek said, the University of California at Santa Cruz is hiring for an assistant professor of developmental psychology to enhance the program’s “long-established strengths in studying the lived experiences of children and youth from diverse backgrounds.” According to the job posting, the department seeks candidates whose research explores areas such as “cultural assets that promote healthy development in the contexts of inequities related to gender, ethnicity/race, social class, and/or sexuality” and “conditions and practices that leverage the psychological strengths of children from historically underserved backgrounds in the U.S. or other countries.”

For that particular position, Soucek said, “it would seem especially strange for somebody to come in and say, ‘I believe in colorblindness and refuse to see people’s race or ethnicity.’”

“The position, after all, is about the diverse, lived experiences of children of different backgrounds,” Soucek said.

The DEI Industry Needs to Check Its Privilege

The worst of the industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive.

The Atlantic

When your clients are these companies that are desperate to do anything and don’t quite understand how this works, ineffective DEI work can be lucrative. And we’re seeing cynicism pop up as a result, that DEI is just a shitty way in which companies burn money.

And I’m like, Yeah, it can be.

How America’s Obsession with DEI Is Sabotaging Our Medical Schools

‘I spent over 50 years as a physician and educator at Penn Med. Now I’m using civil rights legislation to protect the profession—and America

https://www.thefp.com/

For better or worse, I have had a front-row seat to the meltdown of twenty-first-century medicine. Many colleagues and I are alarmed at how the DEI agenda—which promotes people and policies based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation rather than merit—is undermining healthcare for all patients regardless of their status.

Five years ago I was associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and prior to that, codirector of its highly regarded kidney division. Around that time, Penn’s vice dean for education started to advocate that we train medical students to be activists for “social justice.” The university also implemented a new “pipeline program,” allowing ten students a year from HBCUs (historically black colleges or universities) to attend its med school after maintaining a 3.6 GPA but no other academic requirement, including not taking the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). And the university has also created a project called Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project (PMAS) in order to “reshape medical education. . . by creating social justice-informed medical curricula that use race critically and in an evidence-based way to train the next generation of race-conscious physicians.” Finally, twenty clinical departments at the medical school now have vice chairs for diversity and inclusion. 

Although some discussion of social ills does belong in the medical curriculum, I’ve always understood the physician’s main role to be a healer of the individual patient. When I said as much in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2019, “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns,” a Twitter mob—composed largely of fellow physicians—denounced my arguments as racist. Over 150 Penn med school alumni signed an open letter condemning me. Meanwhile, my name has since been scrubbed from the university’s website and I’ve been excised from a short history of the kidney division. 

Similar outrage greeted the outgoing president of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, John Calhoon, when, in a speech to members in January, he encouraged them always to “search for the best candidate” and noted “affirmative action is not equal opportunity.” Within 24 hours, the society denounced Calhoon’s speech for being “inconsistent with STS’s core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and its incoming president announced, “We are going to do what we can to re-earn the trust of our members who have been hurt.” Apparently no one thought to ask the 170,000 Americans who annually undergo a coronary bypass—the most common form of thoracic surgery—if they, too, might prefer to be operated on by “the best candidate.” 

After my drubbing by the Penn med school alumni, I didn’t stay quiet. At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, I noticed that trainees were unprepared to care for critically ill patients. It was becoming clear to me that discriminatory practices—such as reserving monoclonal antibodies against Covid-19 for minority patients, and preferential hospital admission protocols based on race—were infiltrating medicine as a whole. I responded with another Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Med School Needs an Overhaul: Doctors should learn to fight pandemics, not injustice.”

I retired as I’d planned in July 2021, my honorific status as professor emeritus intact, though I haven’t been asked to teach. In March 2022, I published a book, Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns, and started a nonprofit called Do No Harm with some acquaintances to combat discriminatory practices in medicine. We began a program to inform the public and fight illegal discrimination. We demand that any proposed changes in medical school admissions or testing standards require legislative approval and a public hearing—and we are getting results.

Our argument is that medical schools are engaging in racial discrimination in service to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have filed more than seventy complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which exists in large part to investigate schools that discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, sex, age, and disability. Surely the radical activists never expected anyone to turn the administrative state against them, but that’s what we did. And it worked—even under the Biden administration. Do No Harm has filed complaints through OCR over scholarships, fellowships, and programs with eligibility criteria that discriminate based on race/ethnicity (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and/or sex/gender identity (Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972). Many of these are described as programs for students who are “underrepresented in medicine” (UIM). 

For example, we brought the OCR’s attention to a Diversity in Medicine Visiting Elective Scholars Program (archived page) at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Long School of Medicine, which excluded white and Asian students. This is illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which made all racial discrimination associated with government programs illegal. As a result of our action, the OCR opened an investigation. However, Long School of Medicine took down the program page and scrubbed all evidence of it from its website, prompting OCR to close the investigation as “corrected.” While the original scholarship was meant for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, that worthy goal can and should be met without racial discrimination.

Or consider the University of Florida College of Medicine, which offered a scholarship solely to those who were “African Americans and/or Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Hispanic/Latinx, and Pacific Islander.” We asked the OCR to investigate, and the university eliminated the race requirement. Likewise, we filed a complaint against the Medical University of South Carolina over eight scholarships excluding applicants who did not qualify as “underrepresented in medicine.” The OCR opened an investigation, after which the school dropped the exclusionary policy. 

* * *

Racially discriminatory scholarships are not the only sign of the decline of American medical schools. A colleague at Do No Harm and I examined the trend of resegregating medicine, including the idea that black physicians provide better healthcare to black patients than physicians of other races. There is no question disparities exist in health outcomes for minority communities. But no valid studies support the rationale of creating a corps of minority physicians, and last month Do No Harm filed a complaint with the OCR against Duke University’s School of Medicine’s Black Men in Medicine program for race- and sex-based discrimination. 

Even the highly touted New England Journal of Medicine is pushing for race-based segregation in medical schools. Last month, the journal published an article by several doctors and academics at the University of California–San Francisco and UC–Berkeley, calling for the expansion of “racial affinity group caucuses,” or RAGCs, for medical students. “In a space without White people,” the authors write, “BIPOC participants can bring their whole selves, heal from racial trauma together, and identify strategies for addressing structural racism.” The RAGCs include a caucus for white-only medical trainees, as if this would lessen objections to an agenda that has nothing to do with healing and everything to do with identity politics.

Do No Harm is also pushing back against the tide of race-based programs in the corporate world. In February, in the wake of a lawsuit we filed against Pfizer last September claiming a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the pharmaceutical company ended a requirement that college junior applicants to its Breakthrough Fellowship program—which offers guaranteed employment—be black, Hispanic, or Native American. 

At Do No Harm we have publicly and repeatedly pointed out that the likeliest basis for healthcare disparities is not racism, but patients presenting late in the course of their illness, too late to achieve best outcomes. Therefore, we push for better access for minority patients and encourage healthcare institutions to improve outreach to minority communities. We believe that focusing on racial identity will harm healthcare, divide us even more, and reduce trust between patients and physicians, all of which will lead to even worse outcomes.

We have heard from dozens of physicians, nurses, and medical students who feel prevented from speaking out. My advice to my colleagues, young and old, is this: fight back using every tool at your disposal. Highlight the damage that follows the lowering of standards. Call out discrimination done in the name of “equity” and “anti-racism.” Recognize that the majority of your peers may share your views, even if they stay quiet. 

How Academic Freedom Died at Princeton

Compact Magazine, a radical American journal

compactmag.com

Princeton has long had a reputation as the open-minded Ivy. High-school students enduring the arduous college-application process will come across articles describing Princeton as hospitable to conservatives, while the university’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, recently claimed, “We have civil discourse on this campus.” But Princeton’s reputation for relative openness is no longer deserved. In recent years, Princeton has embraced the imperatives of diversity, equity, and inclusion, making it an unwelcoming space for anyone—conservative or liberal, religious or secular—who happens to dissent.

Princeton’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are misnamed: They divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliations by rendering it socially dangerous to express any criticism of progressive mantras. Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees, which could explain the land acknowledgements in syllabi and the deluge of departmental anti-racism statements that inform students what can and can’t be said in class. The university’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning offers recommendations for “inclusive teaching” and encourages instructors to “address blatantly offensive and discriminatory comments and hold students accountable for their behavior,” which seems to contravene the university’s adoption of the University of Chicago’s Free Speech Principles. Princeton’s Office of the Provost encourages departments to “develop a departmental procedure for the regular examination of syllabi to ensure the representation of a diverse array of scholars in the field” and to “redesign the curriculum to address inequities in access and retention.”

In the name of diversity, some requirements have been dropped and others have been added. In 2021, the Princeton classics department began “removing barriers to entry” and stopped requiring study of Greek or Latin, while the politics department introduced a Race and Identity track. The Provost recommends boosting the number of “underrepresented discipline-specific scholars and researchers to participate in departmental events.”

To ensure that faculty hiring results in a diverse work force, academic departments (possibly illegally) appoint a search officer who is the “only individual who can see the confidential individual, self-identified demographic data, including data about gender, race, and ethnicity,” and the officer should “monitor the recruitment and selection processes for tenure-track and tenured faculty positions.” The guidance states that “before the short list is sent to the associate dean for academic affairs or the deputy dean, the search officer must review it for gender and racial/ethnic representation.”

The search officer indicates to the search committee whether the applicant pool is diverse enough and recommends specific individuals without explicitly stating why, thereby circumventing federal and state laws prohibiting race-based hiring. Unsurprisingly, the university has documented a rise in Asian and black tenure and tenure-track faculty since fall 2018, while the white tenure and tenure-track faculty fell by 4.4 percent. Although Princeton doesn’t require diversity statements for hiring, the university has developed guidelines for departments that do wish to ask for such affirmations.

Despite these facts, many still claim that Princeton is insufficiently progressive. Since September 2021, three diversity, equity, and inclusion staff members have resigned from Princeton University alleging a lack of institutional, financial, and emotional support. Former employee J.T. Turner is a self-described “black queer nonbinary person” and a “DEI practitioner [of] 10 years” who was “hospitalized” due to the “highly macro-aggressive environment” in the athletics department. Jim Scholl, a former employee who is HIV-positive, recounted requesting a day off to receive the monkeypox vaccine in New York and being asked to join the morning meeting and work on the train, which supposedly displayed a “complete lack of empathy” for a “queer person trying to survive yet another plague.” The third former employee, Avina Ross, published the article titled “Angry Advocate Revelations,” describing how “exclusion, silencing, white guilt, compassion fatigue, and white assimilative practices” caused her “harm.”

When the Daily Princetonian reported on these resignations, conservatives ridiculed the staffers. Yet one important fact went largely unnoticed. According to the article, Princeton has “more than 70 university administrators whose primary responsibilities consist of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” That averages to about 1 DEI administrator for every 80 undergraduates.

When I inquired about the salary ranges for three DEI-related positions—including the position that Avina Ross held—the university clarified that these are “mid-senior level professional positions” and the expected salary ranges are “$75,000 plus for experienced professionals.” (For comparison, Princeton recently announced increasing graduate students’ fellowship and stipend to approximately $40,000.)

Princeton’s diversity bureaucracy functions as an ideological surveillance system that regulates the social and academic cultures. Freshman orientation has compulsory events that include “diversity and inclusion” in the session’s title, as well as mandatory programs on LGBTQ identity, “mindfulness,” socioeconomic status, and the university’s history of systemic racism.

Undergraduates seeking a bachelor of the arts are required to complete a course in the “Culture and Difference” field, which can be satisfied this semester with courses like “Body Politics: Black Queer Visibility and Representation,” “Police Violence, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Covid-19 Pandemic," “Asian-American Psyches: Model Minority, Microaggressions and Mental Health,” and “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture.”

In 2020, Eisgruber, the Princeton president, asserted that “racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the university itself,” and he committed the institution to a wide range of anti-racism initiatives, such as “develop[ing] an institution-wide, multiyear action plan for supplier and contractor diversity […] and other business partners, including external investment managers.” This “action plan” quickly produced results: The university’s 2021-2022 DEI Report affirms that all $600 million worth of bond transactions were “led by a financial firm owned by people of color, women, veterans, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.”

Princeton’s h.r. department offers a free “Inclusion & Diversity Certificate Program,” complete with courses like “Exploring White Identity,” “Ouch! That Stereotype Hurts,” and “Bias, Privilege, Power, & Workplace Communications.” Moreover, there are “Brave Spaces” for discussions which focus on different themes, such as inclusive language, privilege, and microaggressions. HR events include “LGBT Book Club: ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’” and “What Just Happened? Racial Anxiety in Our Work Relationships.” There are at least 11 employee resource groups, such as the “Network of African-American Male Administrators at Princeton,” which seek to provide “the opportunity to network, share knowledge, build allyship, connection, and increase cultural dexterity.” Princeton’s h.r. department also provides a curated list of resources to combat racism: recommendations include How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and a 10-minute interview with Robin D’Angelo on her book White Fragility.

Extensive as the university’s diversity efforts are, they are insufficient for some undergraduates. Students demanded that the Lewis Center for the Arts implement biannual anti-racist, implicit-bias, and anti-oppression training for all faculty and staff. Students in the creative-writing department demanded affinity spaces for BIPOC students and clarified that “if spaces are created for white [creative writing] students, it is imperative that these spaces exist only as anti-racism learning spaces that are accountable to BIPOC.” Dance students demanded “deconstruct[ing] the association of ‘technique’ with whiteness” and “equitable auditions.”

Ultimately, the university’s allegedly “diverse” spaces are homogenous. They segregate—rather than integrate—individuals with different beliefs, backgrounds, and values. My class’s upcoming graduation in May will have at least five “affinity” celebrations, including an Asian Pacific Islander Desi American graduation, a Latinx graduation, Native American graduation, a Pan-African graduation, as well as Middle-Eastern, North-African, and Arab graduations. Graduation should be a time when all students are united by the accomplishment of completing four years of demanding education, rather than divided on the basis of immutable characteristics.

Meanwhile, the “inclusive spaces” immediately ostracize anyone who slightly disagrees with the orthodoxy du jour. For example, the university’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center expanded the mission of the Women’s Center to encompass males and “nonbinary” individuals, and the center released a statement condemning the Dobbs decision, thereby clarifying that the center isn’t a space for women, but for people—of either sex—who subscribe to a certain ideology.

Princeton formerly had the motto Dei Sub Numine Viget, meaning “Under God’s Power She Flourishes.” Now, Princeton seems to have embraced a new definition of Dei and updated the motto: Under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion She Flourishes. Students who hold a different creed should consider applying elsewhere.