Failing grade: What is DEI and how has it spread across college campuses? By Jeremiah Poff
The phrase diversity, equity, and inclusion may appear to be benign, but it has quietly become the latest frontier in the culture war against woke education .
Often billed as necessary programs and trainings to ensure racially diverse and successful institutions, diversity, equity, and inclusion, also known as DEI, has been decried for stoking racial resentment and prioritizing physical characteristics over merit.
The commonplace programs, which opponents say are just another example of the prevalence of critical race theory in contemporary institutions, have forced college students and many corporate employees to sit through hours of discussions on maintaining a diverse and “inclusive” space.
The expansion of DEI has proved financially lucrative for some, as it has created an entirely new class of employee. In 2022, LinkedIn ranked diversity and inclusion manager as the second-fastest growing job over the past five years.
In higher education, the programs continually rolled out of DEI offices are changing the entire collegiate experience by requiring a host of trainings and programs for students and faculty, beginning with freshman orientation.
In 2021, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, released a report highlighting what it called “DEI bloat” in university administrative offices. The report found that the 65 universities that made up the “power five” conferences had an average of 45 employees tasked with “promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The University of Michigan took the title for the most DEI employees with 163, far more than the University of Virginia and the Ohio State University, which both had 94.
“Diversity, equity and inclusion is the euphemism that is used to describe training, or information exchange about why discrimination is appropriate,” Jonathan Butcher, an education policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “These programs explain that based on your identity group, that you identify with based on your ethnicity, sex, or any other kind of chosen identity group, you deserve special privileges or special benefits because of the identity group that you associate with.”
The programs are widely seen by critics as tied to critical race theory, an academic theory that posits institutions in the United States are built upon and steeped with systemic racism and must be combated through “antiracism.”
The universities defend their programs as essential to maintaining a healthy campus atmosphere. The University of Michigan, for instance, says its “dedication to academic excellence for the public good is inseparable from our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.”
“It is central to our mission as an educational institution to ensure that each member of our community has full opportunity to thrive in our environment, for we believe that diversity is key to individual flourishing, educational excellence and the advancement of knowledge,” the school says on its website.
Institutions often vary in the ways they implement DEI programs and initiatives on their respective campuses. The University of Southern California’s school of social work recently banned the word “field” from curricula, citing its commitment to using “inclusive language.”
Boston University’s School of Medicine vowed to build an “antiracism curriculum” and said that “providing an education that is focused on health equity and actively antiracist is essential.”
But while these institutions trumpet their commitment to diversity as a necessary act to rectify systemic inequities, critics like Butcher say the programs have a chilling effect on academic discourse and attempt to place the guilt of historical wrongs on the living.
“The DEI training programs will tell individuals who are white that they are inherently guilty of some sort of acts committed in the past by people of their same ethnicity, and so that they somehow they must carry some sort of guilt around with them,” he said. “Because of that, the DEI officers on campus, they’re not really talking about diversity … what they’re actually doing is limiting the number of ideas that can be discussed in lecture halls and in classrooms.”
The potentially chilling effect on free expression on college campuses by diversity initiatives was a point made by the college free speech organization Speech First, which filed a Supreme Court amicus brief in the recent affirmative action case involving Harvard University that could see the court strike down race considerations in college admissions.
“Campus administrators have fostered environments of extreme intolerance for ideological diversity in the name of promoting ‘diversity,'” the group argued.
Butcher noted that as commonplace as DEI programs are in higher education, they’re just as prevalent in the workforce. Meanwhile, professional organizations such as the Association of American Medical Colleges have begun rating institutional commitments to DEI and collecting data on the matter.
In November, the AAMC released a report that said all 101 medical schools that participated in the organization’s institutional survey had implemented diversity initiatives in their admissions practices, and the vast majority reported an extensive institutional DEI program.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, the board chairman of the medical watchdog group Do No Harm, said diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in medical schools are not contributing to “enhanc[ing] the quality of the medical workforce,” which he said is what the schools should be focused on.
Having poorly trained doctors, he said, could mean the difference between the life or death of a patient.
“Medicine is intellectually very demanding, and the Institute of Medicine has pointed out that some 200,000 people a year die because of medical errors,” Goldfarb said. “Some of those medical errors are because the doctors are not as well informed or knowledgeable or as intelligent as they possibly could be.”
He added: “I couldn’t care if the medical school class were black or Asian or white or whatever it was. The question is are they the most capable, and this is one field where I don’t think we have the luxury of sacrificing quality for diversity.”
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Cherise Trump, the executive director of Speech First, said that the presence of DEI in medical education posed a unique concern because of the potential to affect research and practice in the medical field.
“When medical schools prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion over science, learning and research suffer,” she said. “DEI is being used as a bludgeon by administrators who seek to impose their version of ‘science’ onto future practitioners. Any serious med student would be concerned that they are being coerced into an ideology that goes against everything the medical field stands for.”
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