More DEI Dysfunction in Academia, And What to Do About it

DEI has made a mockery of our institutions and turned its participants into grotesque carriacatures of themselves.

Mar 05, 2024

Sometimes you see a news story, and there’s an immediate gut reaction - maybe revulsion, or anger, or maybe it makes you smile, or sometimes it even makes you laugh. Knowing this, I'm still trying to decide if the following story from True North is funny, or just plain pathetic. These days when it involves our “institutes of higher learning”, it's usually both, so I'm probably just gonna go with that.

Diversity dysfunction at Wilfrid Laurier University’s faculty of social work

Confidential university documents leaked to True North reveal troubling times within Wilfrid Laurier University’s Faculty of Social Work, characterized by the Indigenous faculty members and the black Dean accusing each other of racism.

Wow. There are within this story, all the elements of a melodramatic They said/She said sitcom, except it's not supposed to be funny.

The main parties at odds here were:

Kathy Hogarth, former (proudly black) Dean of the social work department, and
The Indigenous Field of Study (IFS) social work faculty.

There were letters written by both parties, alleging unspeakable acts of racism.

Here's a few juicy tidbits from from Dean Hogarth’s letter:

The enactment of colonial violence on my Black body is unrelenting.
After being bloodied and bruised at the Faculty Retreat, and nursing the bloodiness of the day, I was forced to dry my tears, put a smile on my face and go welcome a new cadre of students to our institution.
I saw the subtle and not so subtle attempts at destabilizing, the micro-invalidations and the micro insults. Anti-black racism was as real and alive as it has ever been on Wednesday.

At this point I should probably note (for my more sensitive readers) that, as bloody and bruised as Ms. Hogarth apparently was, this whole sordid affair happened in a series of online virtual meetings. After reading that letter, I think someone really ought to produce a theatrical adaptation of this tragedy. I mean, micro-invalidations and micro-insults - it's a wonder the entire facility wasn’t in immediate lockdown.

In response to this letter, the tenured Faculty of Social Work (FSW) started a petition to oust the Dean. It was signed by all 16 faculty members.

They asserted that:

Unfortunately, the toxic and violent climate at the FSW as a result of Dr. Hogarth’s actions have deeply impacted morale, weakening our sense of belonging and community, and have negatively impacted faculty members’ wellbeing.
We are concerned about and question her ability to lead us in meaningful decolonizing or equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) work.

Of course, the Indigenous Field of Study (IFS) faculty sent their own letter to those in charge, complaining that:

We have recently experienced colonial violence and anti-Indigenous racism at the hands of our Dean.
During our remote participation, she was actively violent towards the IFS team as witnessed by our FSW colleagues.

Colonial violence. And this from a black authority figure who is also feeling the unrelenting “enactment of colonial violence on [her] Black body.”

It seems there is an awful lot of colonial violence being perpetrated there by people who are presumably not colonizers. And it's truly amazing how much violence can be enacted over a computer screen since these were all virtual meetings.

Apparently, team IFS felt the Dean’s letter to be “aggressive and assaultive”. Of course they did. And of course, they also called for her dismissal.

In order to remedy the problem, Wilfrid Laurier University felt the best way forward was to offer the Dean a promotion out of the department, which of course she accepted.

In order to gain a bit more clarity on the issue, the university hired a law firm to look into the particulars, and after a thorough investigation, there were two findings. One was that there was indeed a toxic workplace environment in the Faculty of Social Work. Hardly surprising given the circumstances at issue, and also not terribly shocking to those who follow current DEI happenings.

Not sure if I really need to point this out, but these are the people who are training the next cohort of social workers to be released onto some of our most vulnerable citizens, including our children.

The other finding was that, despite allegations that the Dean was “worse than the federal government who had taken Indigenous children from their communities,” and the Dean's own assertions that she experienced “workplace violence, microaggressions, and anti-black racism,” and that faculty members “sometimes forget that Black people can be smart,” there was in fact no actual racism at all.

I guess when you're trained to see racism everywhere, you will constantly experience racism - everywhere. And then it won't be long before your organization begins to eat itself from within.

Another interesting complaint from the Indigenous Faculty was that Dean Hogarth had apparently asked them to give a land acknowledgement, and apparently the elders felt her request was “performative”. No shit. Funny, but that’s the exact word that comes to my mind every single time I hear a land acknowledgement. Of course, the funniest thing about this is that the Dean is asking Indigenous people to acknowledge that the land they are on belongs to - them. Does this Dean even have any concept of what a land acknowledgement is supposed to be?

Needless to say, they refused to give the land acknowledgement.

When asked for feedback on the conference, the indigenous participants wrote things like “less colonialism” and “less bullshit”. Obviously, Dean Hogarth took this as "implicit racism,” because, you know, diversity, equity, and inclusion…

An interesting (and somewhat ironic) addendum to this story is this article published by Wilfred Laurier’s own David Millard Haskell, PhD for the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. In his article, Haskell asserts that:

DEI instruction has been shown to increase prejudice and activate bigotry among participants by bringing existing stereotypes to the top of their minds or by implanting new biases they had not previously held.

Geez, ya don’t say? I've been called all sorts of names for making similar statements (I’m quite sure this piece will generate more), and I’ve been bleating about this for years.

Stories like this really make me feel for preschool teachers. But at least in preschool, you can put the kid on time-out and they’ll usually stay there, and you don’t have to worry about an impending lawsuit.

When I see this kind of thing happening at our universities - places that are supposedly grooming our next generation of leaders to basically run our country - I can’t help but feel a little pessimistic about where we’re heading as a society. If this was just an isolated case, and those responsible were dealt with accordingly and then everything continued on, that would be one thing. But it’s hardly an aberration in our institutions, in fact it’s more the rule than anything else. And we wonder why our society is so fractured.

I’ve been saying for years that the people in charge of these monstrosities need to be fired - every single one of them. These administrations need to be burned to the ground and then rebuilt.

Either that, or we need to create a completely new alternative, much like what they’ve done in Texas at the University of Austin. Their motto is: DARE TO THINK, and I dare say that’s a great place to start. It’s also one of the things that’s sorely lacking in most major universities today, where students are rather taught to parrot orthodoxy and to be fearful of saying or thinking anything counter to the prevailing dogma.

There are other bright spots, like the University of Buckingham, which currently ranks 1st for Freedom of Expression in the UK and is now offering a course called Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology.

The current situation in Canadian universities, however, is the furthest thing from academic freedom, and even freedom of speech which is really the foundation of every other freedom we have here.

DEI initiatives in academia, corporations, and government is the death knell of a free society. The sooner those within these institutions stand up and demand to know what the actual fuck is going on, and then oversee the complete dismantling of these policies, the sooner we can get back to just getting along.