A lot of you guys are looking through DEI from a very narrow minded and somewhat ignorant perspective. You focus on Tech but ignore they’re plenty of DEI programs in college and universities that have helped plenty of Black men get their degrees/education which has greatly improved their/our quality of lives. Whether it’s EOP programs, MBA programs like the consortium there are plenty of DEI programs that have changed Black lives for the better
Just to clarify, I'm invested in equity and affirmative action programs. And there's no doubt that programs created on the backs of past social movements changed many black lives by providing/increasing access and mentoring and pathways where there had been few to none. But the recent DEI wave was not about that. And differentiating universities from corporations is - depressingly - not an effective way of framing the institutions at their core. Certainly not the
private universities. And many of the
public universities don't have the funding or resources to sustain the sort of programs that help the oppressed and disadvantaged.
Years ago on SOHH there was a thread on college admissions, and I weighed in with some insights. There were some impassioned responses, many of which made assertions they insisted were based on facts. I finally broke one of my messageboard rules and revealed some personal information: I'd been a Dean of college admissions at an elite university. I was giving a perspective from the inside. A poster then explained that actually he worked in college admissions too, and he went rattled off a bunch of details about college admissions that immediately clarified he was lying. My point in recounting this is I largely stopped participating in these discussions because that moment helped me realize they're usually about everything but the topic being discussed. They're about sides rather than principles; winning and losing rather than understanding.
At the height of DEI mania I served for a year on the Dean of the Humanities DEI Advisory Board at another university. It was an embarrassing endeavor. I also was on the exec committee of my department's DEI group. It was mostly busywork with meager funding for bringing speakers to campus. Within two years the black people on the committee were so disenchanted and disgusted by their white colleagues' lack of effort and investment they left the committee. It devolved into a glorified bookclub run by a white woman.
In place of funding a culture of reform, the university created more empty administrative positions. Special Provost of Diversity. Diversity and Equity Officer for the Sciences. Etc etc etc. One of them would show up from time to time at a faculty meeting with notecards to pass out, and run us through an exercise about bias and effective communication strategies. Cliche workshops and town halls increased in volume, mostly attended by white students and faculty. The black students aren't fools. They stayed home. The number of black students admitted did not increase - quite the opposite. We'd suggested an overhaul on how to approach college admissions - the sort of change and reform a meaningful social movement yields. Given my prior experience in college admissions, I was brought into meetings with the admissions staff. They never let us get close to seeing data, understanding their process, or suggesting meaningful changes. They did create new, giant placards next to a bunch of the campus bathrooms affirming the rights of anyone to use them regardless of gender. Administrations love signs, slogans, and acronyms - acquiescing to that sort of "change" costs them nothing, and yields very little change. Ask them to hire more black professors and admit more black students and suddenly you'll hear about how complicated and difficult that is.
Now, don't get me wrong, universities did have to perform some forms of reckoning. I personally wrote something in a major academic publication that got 70 college presidents on an emergency zoom meeting, and the result at a lot of those institutions was a push for targeted hires of faculty of color. Want to guess the problem with that? Given the unserious and flimsy culture of DEI, which was steeped in acronyms and identitarianism, the term POC gave search committees a loophole. I watched in bemusement as we hired upper middle class Indians, Egyptians, and trans white women and men with only the occasional Black professor. White women who brought nothing to the table, looked like every other white woman, came from privilege, but had a short haircut and had recently changed names from Patricia to Chaz. They distorted the historical context of the principles of DEI to simply hire even more people who were spiritually and socially aligned with the same old bullshyt.
The campuses across our country are increasingly apolitical. The student bodies back in the early 2000s were already struggling with attracting, admitting, and supporting Black men (another topic entirely, one for another discussion). The administrations are increasingly conservative. The Board of Trustees has gained more administrative and policy control across the vast majority of universities. Things are so fukking regressive and bleak. The period post-George Floyd was so crucial because it represented a moment of genuine opportunity to create cultural change in institutions - the sort of change you can't root out so easily. We let them get away with throwing money at empty admin positions, funding dinners and parties for POC faculty and students, hiring more admin (who work to serve the interests of the institution and will never be "agents of change" as they like to claim) and not more faculty. So, when they decided to pivot away from DEI, all they had to do was halt the cashflow and everything disappeared. There wasn't much to clean up.
Someone in this thread said they think there's something good about DEI because white people were against it. That's such faulty, reactionary thinking. First of all,
the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are - for me - unassailable. But the DEI
culture of the past 6 years or so is a very different thing from the principles. And
plenty of white people loved that. Conservative white people aren't the only white people. I'd also argue one of the insidious things about DEI culture and Kendi X's anti-racism is it did very little for the oppressed while giving the Right a convenient foil to use to galvanize its base. A lot of DEI culture
was silly. And by amplifying the silliest aspects of DEI culture, the right made the actual principles of DEI seem warped. And because we've been so trained by social media to want empty calorie "wins" against "the other side" we were more than happy to support buffoonery and grift if we saw "the other side" didn't like it. It was conservative media that first reported on BLM being a scumbag organization. Many of us rejected the evidence and defended Cullors and her ilk because we reflexively oppose "the other side." I want to be clear here that BLM as a movement was remarkable in its beginning stages. Political and social organizing is awesome. We need that. But BLM the organization was something totally different and similar to DEI as a culture vs. DEI the principles, and Kendi X's shameful Anti-Racism vs Critical Race Theory (which predates Kendi X): legitimate social and intellectual movements got gaffled by opportunistic girfters on "our side." They associated themselves with principles we defend, and effectively turned us into their security while they grifted right in our faces.
You mind sharing?
