DeSantis calls the bureaucrats’ bluff Story by Jay P Greene
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/desantis-calls-the-bureaucrats-bluff/ar-AA17jGOb
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has a plan for freeing public universities from the stranglehold of their diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies. Before DeSantis launched this effort, it was widely believed, even among those who recognized the dangers of DEI, that there was really nothing public officials could do about the problem. Just like the weather, it was simply something we would all have to learn to live with. Public universities were thought to be outside of political control, and academic culture was thought to be too committed to DEI goals. But DeSantis is proving that something can be done. His plan is likely to make significant progress in dismantling DEI in higher education.
DeSantis is showing that DEI is not beyond the reach of elected officials, at least not at public universities. In most states, public universities are state agencies, just like the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Game and Fish Commission. They may have their own boards of trustees, but those boards were created, and can be modified, by legislation, and their activities are governed by state laws and regulations. States can reorganize how public universities are structured to achieve public purposes better, just as they can reorganize the DMV. Lawmakers may alter the size and composition of the Game and Fish Commission, as well as the process for appointing those officials, and they can do the same with the boards of public universities.
In the past, state officials refrained from addressing the rise of DEI bureaucracies in public universities, not out of an inability to do so legally but from a conviction that it was somehow inappropriate for them to interfere. DeSantis’s innovation was to recognize that this self-restraint was unnecessary, counterproductive, and based largely on a misunderstanding of what DEI bureaucracies actually are.
DEI units at universities are not faculty, nor are they engaged in the core functions of teaching and conducting research. They are staff with the ostensible purpose of helping welcome students, faculty, and staff from different backgrounds to campus and creating conditions that facilitate their success. DEI staff members develop a set of practices and inculcate related dispositions that university leaders believe are necessary for welcoming diverse groups and ensuring that they thrive. One might say that DEI staff members articulate and enforce a university-approved orthodoxy regarding a set of divisive political concerns.
Let’s leave aside the appropriateness of university staff serving as a political commissariat to police an approved political ideology. DEI staff members clearly are not covered by traditional norms protecting academic freedom because their activities do not consist of teaching classes or conducting research. They are staff, just like the bureaucrats who run student housing or work in the bursar’s office. No one thinks that how students are assigned to housing or pay their bills are matters covered by academic freedom. By recognizing that public university DEI bureaucracies are protected by neither law nor norms of academic freedom, DeSantis has shed the self-imposed shackles that deterred earlier efforts to rein them in.
In the process, he has also demonstrated just how weak the support for DEI bureaucracies is in the academy outside of those bureaucracies themselves.
To dismantle DEI, DeSantis is pursuing a series of initiatives. Most directly, he has proposed “forbidding institutions from using any funding to support initiatives relating to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, critical race theory, and other programs he considers discriminatory.” Defunding the DEI bureaucracy is the most obvious way to dismantle DEI. But DeSantis understands that DEI activities may simply get renamed and reappear elsewhere within the university, so he does not rely solely on defunding DEI.
He is taking other steps to block any attempt to end-run his defunding effort. For instance, he is seeking to ban diversity statements from being required as part of hiring or promoting faculty. And he has appointed a slate of anti-DEI trustees to the New College of Florida, one of the state’s smaller but most prestigious public institutions. Placing vocal critics of DEI, such as Chris Rufo and Mark Bauerlein, in charge of a state college has sent a clear signal to all of Florida’s state universities that DeSantis is serious about dismantling DEI.
To drive home the message, the newly appointed board removed the president of the New College in short order. That left no doubt. Senior university administrators who attempted to shield DEI would suffer consequences.
The 28 presidents of the Florida College System got the message. In a joint statement, they acknowledged, “The presidents of the Florida College System (FCS) also understand that some initiatives and instruction in higher education under the same title [DEI] have come to mean and accomplish the very opposite and seek to push ideologies such as critical race theory and its related tenets.” They then pledged that “our institutions will not fund or support any institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality, or the idea that systems of oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning are analyzed and/or improved upon.”
At Texas Tech University, leaders abandoned the use of diversity statements in professor hiring within hours of the publication of a piece in the Wall Street Journal documenting how those statements were being used to discriminate and keep out qualified candidates. The collapse of DEI continued to spread the next day, as Rufo reported on Twitter, “Texas Gov. Abbott’s chief of staff sent a letter to all state universities warning that their DEI programs violate civil rights law.” The speed of DEI’s capitulation may make the French stand against the Germans look like Thermopylae.
The fact that higher education leaders could fold so quickly should not come as a surprise. The truth is that few university administrators, faculty, and students have any deep commitment to protecting DEI bureaucracies. It’s fair to say that the only enthusiastic supporters of campus DEI bureaucracies are those employed in them and the relatively small group of rabble-rousing students who can be organized by the DEI machinery to menace other administrators, faculty, or students who deviate from their orthodoxy.
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