The Left Already Knows That DEI Is a Lie

By Nate Hochman

Thursday, February 23, 2023

 

As “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) spills out of the faculty lounge and euphemizes its way into the nation’s elite institutions, conservatives have begun to notice something’s amiss. “One Type of Diversity Never Seems to Matter,” Carrie Lukas declared in Forbes, pointing out that DEI doesn’t give a fig for “political or ideological diversity.” “‘Equity’ doesn’t mean what the left says it means,” a headline from Matt Clark, the president of the Alabama Center for Law and Liberty, argued. In the Washington Times, Everett Piper polemicized against left-wing “hypocrites” who supported censorship and illiberalism while invoking “inclusion,” “diversity,” and “tolerance.”

 

Allegations of hypocrisy, of course, are merited. Scott Yenor’s recent report on the rise of the equity regime at Texas A&M (TAMU) provides a glimpse into the gap between DEI’s public claims and its real, material meaning. Formally, Yenor notes, “diversity” is portrayed as the principle that “everyone and every group should be valued” by “embracing and celebrating the rich dimensions of difference”; in practice, it represents “an identity-based approach to society,” intended to box out “now-disfavored groups like whites and males through ‘political quotas.’” Formally, “equity” is allegedly aimed at “overcoming challenges and bias to achieve equal opportunity”; in practice, it redounds to “equality of outcomes plus reparations.” Formally, “inclusion” means “bringing the formerly excluded into activities and decision-making so as to share power”; in practice, it’s “enforced segregation of people by race” and “restrictions on speech” for disfavored groups.

 

Yenor substantiates those claims with a startling statistic: As the DEI regime advanced through TAMU — to the tune of well over $11 million, and an array of new programs, departments and salaried sinecures for diversity czars — white, black, and Hispanic students all began to feel more alienated from the university. From 2015 to 2020, the percentage of white students “who agreed or strongly agreed that they belonged at A&M” declined by 10 points. Over the same period, the percentage of Hispanic students who said they belonged declined by 12 points. For black students, the percentage declined by a whopping 27 points.

 

It should come as no surprise that the stated intention of DEI is at odds with its material effects. But that dissonance has been evident from the start. In reality, DEI is only a more blatant iteration of a project that predates the newest round of buzzwords, and arrived under the guise of other catchphrases — few, if any, of which actually meant what progressives claimed.

 

The concept of “academic freedom” is an instructive example. Despite its popularity among contemporary conservatives, academic freedom, at least in the modern context, was originally a left-wing cause. Its formal, public meaning, as expressed by the founding statement of the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 Declaration of Principles — described by the historian Walter Metzger as “the philosophical birth cry” of academic freedom in America — was the desire for “complete and unlimited freedom to pursue inquiry and publish its results.” But in the hands of the progressive professoriate, it served as a means to dismantle the relatively conservative academic culture and pedagogy of the old American university, and to replace it with the decisively progressive orthodoxy we see on today’s campuses. None other than William F. Buckley Jr. himself penned his first book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951), as a broadside against “that handy slogan,” which, he argued, was utilized by left-wing faculty “to obtain license when and where they desire it” — “their policy,” he wrote, “is one of expedience.”

 

Just as the formal claims of DEI are very different from the true nature of the ideology, the Left’s invocation of “academic freedom” was never really about a pluralistic attitude toward the expression of different views on campus. It was a convenient argument to make, for a time, to demand a tolerance of progressive values in previously conservative institutions. Once those institutions complied, progressives were all too happy to leave “academic freedom” by the wayside, and quickly set about establishing new orthodoxies and dogmas that brooked no dissent.

 

In the same way, DEI isn’t about authentic “diversity” or “inclusion.” Nor is “equity” really about equal opportunity or treatment, at least as conservatives — and probably most Americans — understand those terms. Last year, two education writers “watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually” in 2021 by a flagship equity conference that “sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies,” and reported on their findings in a Wall Street Journal essay: “Equity requires dismantling all systems that Bipoc members of the community believe to cause harm,” they concluded. “Justice is the final stage of social transformation to ‘collective liberation.’” One quote they captured from a “DEI practitioner” at one of the sessions summarized the real purpose of DEI — a stark contrast with its friendlier, corporate-buzzword iterations: “The ongoing act of deconstructing, dismantling, disrupting . . . colonial ideologies and the superiority of Western thought.”

 

The allegation that DEI is hypocritical is true, of course. But it also misses the point. By focusing on the ideology’s failure to achieve its stated intentions, or defending a more “authentic” version of its goals (“diversity, equity and inclusion are all fine things, but DEI officialdom is typically about a very different agenda,” the New York Post editorial board argued in 2021), conservatives fail to recognize that intellectual consistency was never the intention to begin with. For the Left, diversity, equity, and inclusion have very little to do with their formal public meanings. They are about a concerted assault on one set of values, and the assertion of another, radically different one in its stead.