From Political Correctness to DEI: (From the best of intentions to thoroughly hellish circumstances)
part 2
I had been interested in the article by Jan Blits, “Saving Shakespeare” [1], because one of my hobby horses is the controversy over the authorship of the plays attributed to “William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon” [2a,b]. Wanting to know more about Blits, I came across his 2010 article “Hidden (and not-so-hidden) new threats to faculty governance” [3]. I was horrified at how DEI bureaucrats in the Resident Life program at the University of Delaware had been indoctrinating students in mandated sessions; some one-on-one, where students had to respond to such questions as, “When did you discover your sexual identity?”; as well as some group meetings using training materials with such information as
“A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination….
REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give ‘preferential treatment’ of people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’”
Shades of Cornel Morton 30 years earlier at my university. Read Blits’s whole article, and weep for academe.
The second article of interest is “Why are K-12 schools turning out radicals?” by Yuriy V. Karpov [4]. Critical race theory has inspired “what some American students say they are being taught:
‘We are told that racism is embedded in culture and that we cannot escape it. We hear that white people are inherently racist. We are told that racism is “prejudice plus power,” therefore, only white people can be racist. We are informed that only people of color can talk about racism, that white people need to just listen, and that they don’t have the “racial stamina” to engage it. We hear that not seeing people in terms of their race (being color-blind) is, in fact, racist and an attempt to ignore the pervasive racism that dominates society and perpetuates white privilege.’”
The article also sheds light on how young generations are being indoctrinated to see things differently: “whereas 81 percent of American respondents backed Israel in its war against Hamas terrorists, 50 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds respondents supported Hamas, and 60 percent of respondents in this age group believed that Hamas’s October 7 massacre was justified by ‘Palestinian grievances.’”
The third article describes and explains why well-meaning young people seize on simple explanations as satisfactory. In “‘Wild’ Critical Analysis” [5], James Dillon recalls that “Given what Plato witnessed in some of Socrates’ students, he suggested not teaching the dialectic (Socratic Method) until they were at least thirty.” Examples are given from Sigmund Freud, how an inexperienced psychoanalyst can do harm; “change cannot happen simply by sharing propositionally true knowledge with someone”.
Goethe made the point long ago:
“Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!”
(Loosely translated: What has been handed down to you
doesn’t become yours until you have earned it.)
Learning cannot be passive. To understand something it is necessary to have thought about it and its connections to other things. Simply confronting someone with facts does not produce or change beliefs. I’ve long found a personal example quite striking. I had read for about a decade the arguments published pro and con about whether HIV caused AIDS, without being able to decide one way or the other. But then a citation that could not be right caused me eventually to look at all the original articles that had reported HIV tests in the USA, and I was stunned at the regularities of dependence on age and race, and that testing “positive” happened so frequently with pregnant women, mentally ill people, TB patients, and in many other illnesses. Quite clearly, HIV tests do not track a sexually transmitted infection. All the data were published in my book, and a survey of the whole HIV/AIDS literature is available on-line. As far as I know, just looking at those facts has not changed any minds; I was persuaded because I spent many hours collecting and collating and thinking about the facts.
So the facts about DEI are also unlikely to change any minds. Our political polarization makes matters worse, as we each take “information” only from friendly sources. So Bill Maher will be severely chastised by some people for suggesting that DEI ideology played some minor part in making the California wildfires more damaging [6]. Some of my acquaintances, friends, and even family members will not be pleased when I say that the (second) election of Donald Trump will bring the beneficial effect of curbing some of the DEI extremism; and that Trump’s nomination of Jay Bhattacharya as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a truly excellent choice. Even some of the influence exerted by that wild card, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., might bring about some more carefully evidence-based medical practices; say, the elimination of advertisements that advise young boys to be administered the worse-than-useless [7] HPV vaccine.
It is a fact of the human story — as some might say, the human tragedy — that perfectly well-intentioned people sometimes manage to cause great harm; while other people who might seem lacking in any trace of saving graces somehow cause good things to happen, even significantly important good things.
The words of William Butler Yeats, in “The Second Coming”, seem eerily relevant today:
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold….
The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
DEI has the Democratic Party beholden to its elitist extremists, as MAGA has the Republican Party beholden to a narcissist populist. Our present “center” awaits leaders and organization. So far there are only a few prominent names outside the polar opposites: those conservatives and traditional Republicans repelled by MAGA (say, Lynn Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Joe Scarborough, George Will), or such black independent intellectuals as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter. ) Party registration numbers suggest, though, that centrism or moderation appeals to the majority of Americans.
Apart from great uncertainty over what will happen inside the USA during the next few years, I fear that the chaos and shambles of will lose the USA the status it has had for something like a century, of “a shining city on a hill” that is the envy of the rest of the world; the status that made innumerable individuals like me so grateful for having been allowed to become citizens of the United States.
============================================================================
[1] Jan H. Blits, “Saving Shakespeare”, Academic Questions, 37 (2024) 32-9
[2a] Diana Price, Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem (Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies), Praeger, 2000
[2b] Peter A. Sturrock, AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question, Exoscience Publishing, 2013
[3] Jan H. Blits, “Hidden (and not-so-hidden) new threats to faculty governance”, Journal of Academic Freedom, 1 (2010);
https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/journal-academic-freedom/volume-1
[4] Yuriy V. Karpov, “Why are K-12 schools turning out radicals?”, Academic Questions, 37 (2024) 40-48
[5] James Dillon, “‘Wild’ Critical Analysis”, Academic Questions, 37 (2024) 56-60
[6] Bill Maher, Real Time (TV, HBO), 17 January 2025
[7] Henry Bauer, “HPV, Cochrane review, and the meaning of cause’”, 2018/10/27; https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com//hpv-cochrane-review-and-the-meaning-of-cause/