A month or so ago, I read an article reporting that Ben Sasse had sent the entire DEI bureaucracy at the University of Florida packing. Sasse’s action will bring UF into compliance with a 2023 Board of Governors regulation that stipulates that state universities are forbidden from expending state or federal funds to advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. It will also save the UF $5 million. One wonders what UF will do with the $5 mill. NIL, I suppose.
The Florida initiative resides at one end of the spectrum. At the other end, there is the report that Harvard will offer graduates a multitude of commencement ceremonies, including one for lower class graduates. I know we don’t say “lower class” anymore. I just don’t remember how they describe it (it’s the one for the graduates who will never be big donors). Muslim graduates will have their own. Harvard doesn’t want to be seen as antisemitic, so the Jews will be sequestered for their own commencement. I wonder if Harvard’s administration will round them up as it is encouraged to do by Harvard students.
Now curious, I decided to bring myself up to date on the status of DEI at Alma Mater. What I found is an enterprise that operates on an industrial scale.
A visit to the ND website (tab entitled Campus Life > Inclusion) directs visitors to diversity.ne.edu. I went to the “Policies and Reporting” page. It was there on my journey that I entered an Orwellian world: how to make complaints about faculty conduct; or how to rat out one’s fellow students (take your pick, the Notre Dame Integrity Line, 24/7, toll-free; or Speakup.nd.edu). I thought about calling the commissar who directs the Office of Institutional Equity to ask what institutional equity is.
On to the “Train and Learn” page. The section features a veritable cafeteria of training sessions in woke ideology, e.g., the Staff Multicultural Competencies Training. The pages are littered with the clotted language of wokeism: gender, privilege, race, racism and oppression, sexuality, religion, religious privilege/oppression, education, class and classism, structural/systemic sources for bias. Don’t you want to ask what “religious privilege” is? In the twisted way these things work, it might mean being Catholic.
There is nothing I can do about any of this, of course, but it would be interesting to see the numbers associated with DEI at ND. I feel badly for the parents of ND kids whose tuition payments subsidize this nonsense. Institutional equity indeed. Institutional featherbedding.