The Beginning of the End of DEI

The smoldering DEI pile is about to become the full-fledged dumpster fire it was always destined to be.

The resignation of Harvard president, Claudine Gay has underscored in a new way how sick and tired we all are of these DEI games. Even those who aren’t familiar with DEI practices and dogma (and therefore still think it must be a good thing) are beginning to tire of the nonsense it has produced.

According to billionaire Harvard alumnus, Bill Ackman regarding Ms. Gay’s appointment as president, “the committee would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria.” Presumably these criteria didn’t involve even a casual search of the kind of papers she had published. And really, there are less than 20 of them, so how much work could that have been? It sure didn’t take long for the New York Post to uncover dozens of examples of plagiarism in her work (almost 50 at last count), so how is it that Harvard missed all of them? Was Harvard just so excited to finally have a black woman as president that they just couldn't be bothered to even look at the rest of her? She may have been the first black woman to be president of Harvard, but she also holds the distinction of enjoying the shortest tenure of any Harvard president since its inception.

In her resignation letter, Gay says she was "subjected to threats fueled by racial animus". What she neglected to mention was how she basically ignored the "threats fueled by racial animus" directed towards the Jewish population of Harvard. Well, that and her penchant for serial plagiarism. Can these people be any more disconnected from the vast majority of normal people on the continent?

The real joke here (if one is even able to laugh at such a thing) is that all she had to do was answer the easiest question known to man and say, "YES, when you call for the genocide of Jews on university campus, this goes against our standards". That's it. And likely everyone would have just gone home and not even looked at her sorry record. She would still be Harvard’s president today. But she couldn’t do it. Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania had the same problem. The entire country was baffled. Why were these women so unable to definitively answer such a simple question?

The answer to this I think has more to do with religion than anything else, because this is what DEI has become. There is a dogma that you simply don’t cross if you want to remain in the fold. This has been demonstrated time and again over the last decade or more.

The other joke is how we’re apparently supposed to believe that the real villains here are the conservatives who have “targeted” Gay and academia in general. Here are a few salient examples of our mainstream media’s take on this matter:

CBC: Harvard president's resignation highlights U.S. conservatives' bid to remake higher education

LA Times: Column: On Harvard, plagiarism, and the racist right-wing attack on university education

MSN: Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage

And my absolute favourite from the Associated Press. This one was mocked so relentlessly online that they had to change the headline the next day. This is the Archived version:

Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism

According to FIRE’s (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, out of 248 US colleges, Harvard comes in dead last. Oh, and University of Pennsylvania is #247. Coincidence? I think not.

And yet, during a congressional hearing, Claudine Gay from Harvard had this to say:

We embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, and hateful.

Unless of course, you happen to be using the wrong pronouns…

Her performance at that hearing was so bad, even Saturday Night Live did a skit mocking it. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find that video anywhere. All I get is this:

Not sure who to blame for this, but I do have my suspicions. If you find a link that works, you can always try putting it in the comment section below.

Back to religion *ahem*, I mean DEI. If you’re unsure of what DEI is about, allow me to enlighten you just a little bit. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it has anything to with Diversity, Equity, or Inclusion - at least not according to their established definitions.

Diversity

Here’s Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of diversity:

the fact of many different types of things or people being included in something; a range of different things or people.

One would expect that diversity would include not only people of different races and cultures, but also people from different social backgrounds and classes, different religions, people with different ideologies and political persuasions - basically like a cross-section of the country we live in.

In the context of DEI, diversity basically just means race, but it’s race by numbers which is why certain quotas need to be set to achieve the predetermined outcome. What they’re really after when they say Diversity is conformity.

Equity

Here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition of the word, equity:

a: justice according to natural law or right

specifically : freedom from bias or favoritism

The whole idea of equity in the United States and Canada has always been based on the idea that everyone has the same chance to succeed - equality of opportunity. This is one of the biggest reasons (if not the biggest reason) people want to come here from other countries. What DEI asserts is that we must now ensure equal outcomes, regardless of effort. In practice, this means those in power get to decide who gets the opportunity and who doesn’t. As long as they call it equality, the rest of us are just supposed to accept it, and up until recently, most of us have.

In order to maintain the illusion of “freedom from bias or favoritism”, the DEI gurus have decided that they need to impose their own bias and favoritism in order to accomplish their vision of what constitutes equity. They’re not about to leave it up to “natural law” to sort it out, because again, that wouldn’t yield the results that their models have told them are desirable.

Inclusion

Ask any six- or seven-year-old what the word “inclusion” means and they could tell you right away, especially if they have some older siblings, or they’re part of the public school system. You’d think this would be a pretty easy word to define, but again these people have screwed it up. Really, it’s our fault for not pushing back on this soon enough. They can scream about inclusion all they want, but when all they demonstrate is intolerance for anyone who doesn’t agree 100% with their viewpoints, the jig is up.

The fallout of the DEI experiment

For what it’s worth, I’m 100% for actual diversity, real equity, and genuine inclusion. The problem is that the current state of DEI is none of these things, regardless of what its proponents are telling us. I believe what we’re seeing now is the beginning of the end of DEI. Well, I certainly hope that’s the case anyway. Indeed, we already saw it starting in the spring of 2023 when Stanford University faced a scathing backlash (and a couple of resignations) for their treatment of Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge, Kyle Duncan. I wrote about that one here. Their Law Dean, Jenny Martinez made a rare stand with a long and scathing rebuke to the students and their now ex-DEI Dean. That episode just got the ball rolling.

So, it’s been fun, this DEI experiment, but now we’ve seen the fruits of it, and they’re even worse than what many have been warning about for years. But it’s precisely because of this grisly harvest that we also got to see a lot of people wake up to what’s really going on. Here are some of the DEI highlights of 2023:

• This last year saw big tech companies trim their DEI roles by over 40% and cut DEI groups as much as 90%.

• In June, the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

• DEI ideologies are largely responsible for increased antisemitism on college campuses owing to the classist belief that the world consists solely of oppressor and oppressed or colonizers and colonized. 2023 also saw much backlash against this idea after the predictable response of these institutions to the Hamas attacks of October 7th.

• Parents have been rising up here as well with many protests against “Woke” and gender ideology in schools.

• World Athletics, World Aquatics, and World Rugby have all instituted bans on transgender athletes in the female category.

I would expect all of these issues to gain more steam in 2024 because, as I’ve been saying, the more these stories come out, the more stories will continue to come out. Along with that, the more we hear about parents standing up for their rights and the rights of their kids, the less afraid other parents will be to do the same. The same goes for college students, teachers, professors, and employees in general.

Eventually, I believe those in authority will have no choice but to give way to real leaders who will do what we hired them to do, and who will cater to the best interests of their companies, their students, their athletes, and whomever else they are mandated to serve, instead of fringe ideas and screaming mobs. This is what just happened at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, and this is what I’m hopeful for more of in 2024.

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