"A 2021 American Enterprise Institute survey of academic job postings found that 19% required DEI statements, and elite institutions were more likely to require them."
"Speech First, a group advocating for First Amendment rights on US campuses, released an investigation on Thursday that found 165 of 248 selected institutions — from American University to Williams College — mandate DEI-related classes to meet general education requirements."
DEI is a good idea that has led to a catastrophic backlash.
Imagine a world where us intellectual types hadn’t given the right this kind of talking point on a silver platter. Election might have gone differently.
I like to imagine a world where the institutions that were supposed to protect us had done their jobs, and enforced the gentleman’s agreement we had, that worked so well these past 50 years.
I largely agree but I doubt other issues would be such massive free wins for Republicans. The Republican base has become rabid over DEI and trans issues and it has been really obvious for a while now that it was going to be a massive problem for Democrats. Sadly these issues have become more divisive than even gun control.
"trans issues" are literally an issue they invented. They've been workshopping attack vectors for years. Bathrooms didn't really work, so they switched to athletes, which did.
They will continue inventing issues until they find one that sticks.
They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ads trying to convince people these things were a problem. That is, by definition, not a free win.
You have to realize some of these issues didn't used to be as divisive. They made them divisive. Abortion being the most obvious. If you need an issue to rally around, you create one.
You point to the issue Republicans have with trans people existing, isn't that a counterpoint to your point?
They were able to make a massive issue out of the existence of less than a percent of the population, if the can do that how can you say they wouldn't have made issues of literally anything?
Should one be required to submit a statement proving their past support of DEI as part of the hiring process in academia? What should people who disagree with such efforts put in this statement?
But it is. DEI indicates ideological capture. Whether it's good or bad doesn't matter, it's not germane to the purported goals of "advancing science/health/military readiness/etc". At best it's tangential.
If we were a robust and wealthy country, then perhaps we could engage in these sorts of boutique social experiments. But we are not. We've got serious problems on multiple fronts. Fixing it before it all goes blooey means serious disruption, and we're now well into 30 years of positive reinforcement on the ideological capture. You're not going to get the results you need from the people who benefitted from the previous mismanagement. Trump learned that lesson quite directly the last time he was in office.
You don’t even know what you’re arguing against. “Ideological capture” is not an argument either. Whatever system is in place will be the result of one ideology or another.
“We are not a robust and wealthy country.” Good lord, who is telling you this?
If you could please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42951612 and stop breaking HN's rules, regardless of how wrong anyone else is or you feel they are, we'd appreciate it.
I know it's not easy when times are urgent and feelings understandably run high, but those are the times when the rules need to count the most (as the site guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.")
Do you think that DEI is just some line item in a budget that can easily be produced? Without which we'll just have to shrug our shoulders and endlessly equivocate about how their might be some waste?
> ...Faculty Diversity Action Plan, a special funding program for diversity-focused faculty hiring, which ran until 2023, when it was restructured and renamed. Created in 2020, the program played a significant role in dictating whom the university hired. In a 2022 faculty meeting, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was asked how many professors were hired through the program since it began. He estimated that around 90% were either hired through the program or were spousal hires.
