Tenure ban fails; DEI offices banned - Texas

They shouldn't be banned, but they should be held to standards of quality assurance. The oversteps and abuses coming out of DEI programs are nightmarish. Even when well-intentioned and staffed with qualified professionals (a rare best case scenario) they are quite consistently doing more harm than good.

 

Heres a first-hand anectote. It's just one, but is a story I see and hear repeated over and over. It's also something I've witnessed, myself, in my long history of working in universities.

Note that the person who wrote this article is an eminently qualified black female DEI director. I know this is a very long selection of quotes, but it is an excellent article and it's hard to pick just one or two points from it.

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Source: https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-dei-director-canceled-by-dei


"From the beginning, efforts to obstruct my work were framed in terms that might seem bizarre to those outside certain academic spaces. For instance, simply attempting to set an agenda for meetings caused my colleagues to accuse me of “whitespeaking,” “whitesplaining,” and reinforcing “white supremacy”—accusations I had never faced before. I was initially baffled, but as I attended workshops led by my officemates and promoted by my supervising dean, I repeatedly encountered a presentation slide titled “Characteristics of White-Supremacy Culture” that denounced qualities like “sense of urgency” and “worship of the written word.” Written meeting agendas apparently checked both boxes.

...

When I formed the Heritage Month Workgroup, bringing together community members to create a multifaith holiday and heritage month calendar, the De Anza student government voted to support this effort. However, my officemates and dean explained to me that such a project was unacceptable, because it didn’t focus on “decentering whiteness."

...

Just hours after this senate meeting, a group of colleagues attended the Foothill-De Anza Board of Trustees meeting and called for my immediate termination. (A public video of this meeting is available.) These individuals claimed to represent campus racial-affinity groups, but they hadn’t polled their group members or gotten consensus on the statements they issued. This sort of dynamic, where single individuals present themselves as speaking for entire groups, is part and parcel of the critical-social-justice approach. It allows individuals to present their ideological viewpoints as unassailable, since they supposedly represent the experience of the entire identity group to which they belong. Hence, any criticism can be framed as an attack on the group.

...

My case, sadly, isn’t unique. At colleges across the country, critical-social-justice adherents are inserting their ideological stances as the supreme determinants of whether candidates advance in the tenure-review process. Faculty are under pressure to profess their allegiance to this particular set of dogmas and to embed a certain way of talking and thinking about race into their course curriculum. They are being encouraged to categorize every student as a victim or an oppressor and to devote their classes to indoctrination.

...

If certain ideologues have their way, compelled speech will become an even more common aspect of university life. Faculty and staff will be obligated to declare their gender pronouns and to use gender-neutral terms like “Latinx” and “Filipinx,” even as many members of the groups in question view these terms as expressions of cultural and linguistic imperialism. Soon enough, we may also be formally required to start all classes and meetings with land acknowledgments, regardless of how empty a gesture this may seem to living members of tribal nations.

All of these things are on the horizon, because faculty members are afraid to resist. They know that anyone who questions these practices will be accused of racism and other grave sins. "

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I recommend the article I linked above as a summary of what the problems are. As for data that DEI is ineffective and harmful, I'll first start with the opposite question. Is there any evidence that DEI is actually accomplishing anything, anywhere? I've quoted a large, recent, study below.

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Source: Annual Review of Psychology report on DEI implementation and outcomes: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-psych-060221-122215

"In this review, we utilize a narrative approach to synthesize the multidisciplinary literature on diversity training... We note that scholars of diversity training, when testing the efficacy of their approaches, too often use proxy measures for success that are far removed from the types of consequential outcomes that reflect the purported goals of such trainings. We suggest that the enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goal...

Taken as a whole, our review of the literature on DT reveals that, in light of the overarching goals of DT in these settings, the evidence regarding the efficacy of DT is for the most part wanting. The lack of systemic and rigorous research investigating company-wide DT, combined with the mixed nature of evidence regarding the efficacy of the programs, prevents us from drawing clear conclusions regarding best practices for organizational DT."

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That's a whole lot of nothing for a $9.4 billion dollar industry projected to increase threefold by 2030. (Source: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06219616/Global-Diversity-and-Inclusion-D-I-Industry.html?utm_source=GNW)

So, little-to-no evidence that it works. What about the harm it causes?

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Source: Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail

"Firms have long relied on diversity training to reduce bias on the job, hiring tests and performance ratings to limit it in recruitment and promotions, and grievance systems to give employees a way to challenge managers... Yet laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out.

...

The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash.

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What’s more, lab studies show that protective measures like grievance systems lead people to drop their guard and let bias affect their decisions, because they think company policies will guarantee fairness.

Things don’t get better when firms put in formal grievance systems; they get worse. Our quantitative analyses show that the managerial ranks of white women and all minority groups except Hispanic men decline—by 3% to 11%—in the five years after companies adopt them.

The numbers sum it up. Your organization will become less diverse, not more, if you require managers to go to diversity training, try to regulate their hiring and promotion decisions, and put in a legalistic grievance system."

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When someone is "trying to change the social fabric of America" it's perfectly reasonable to be concerned about their motives and the potential for corruption and abuse. Especially when they are averse to accountability and intolerant of any form of criticism.