Totalitarian DEI dictatorship at a community college
I have been criticizing political correctness for three or four decades, noting that things were becoming progressively worse — no matter that for some considerable time one might have imagined that they could not possibly get any worse; yet they have continued to do so.
So perhaps I should not have been surprised to learn of an episode that illustrates my points to a degree — more famous last words — that surely cannot be exceeded.
In the article, “Claudine Gay was not driven out because she is Black” [1], John McWhorter mentions “The experience last year of Tabia Lee, a Black woman who was fired from supervising the D.E.I. program at De Anza College in California”, citing the report, “DEI College Director fired for not being ‘Right Kind of Black Person’”[2].
The fired individual, Tabia Lee, had told the story herself in “A Black DEI Director canceled by DEI”, in COMPACT, 31 March 2023 [3].
Read all that, and weep for what has become of “higher education” in the United States.
Am I making an unreasonable extrapolation from one community college to all of higher education? Is De Anza College in California just an anomalous outlier?
No. The anomalous outlier is Tabia Lee.
She is an outlier in contemporary academe for being clear-eyed about what higher education ought to be, and for being devoted to those principles and values, and above all for standing up openly and publicly against the DEI fanatics and tyrants.
I have observed at first hand what political correctness has wrought in American academe, during a dozen years teaching at the University of Kentucky, half-a-dozen years as Dean at Virginia Tech, and another 15 years as a faculty member there. My first-hand observations were also confirmed and enhanced by what I learned from others through editing the Virginia Scholar [4], and through the activities and publications of the National Association of Scholars (NAS; nas.org) and the Association of College Trustees and Alumni (ACTA;
https://www.goacta.org/
).
At Virginia Tech, during nearly two decades, I was one of a literal handful (≤5!) publicly criticizing political correctness; that’s why I can confidently recognize Tabia Lee as an anomaly, an outlier.
DEI has also been largely responsible for administrative bloat.
“Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed [at colleges and universities in the U.S.] increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. [But] full-time faculty . . . increased by only 92% [while] student enrollment . . . grew by 78%” [5].
One part of the reason is the incessant striving to attract students by offering increasingly opulent facilities and services and treating them as consumers [6]. However, the most consequential part of the reason has been the drive to employ people from previously underrepresented groups.
In the early days of affirmative action, administrative positions were created for such appointments since an insufficient number from those groups had qualifications appropriate to faculty positions.
Like all administrators, these newbies sought to enlarge their role and its importance by creating new projects that required new staffing; and as affirmative action morphed into DEI, there have come essentially endless opportunities to think up possible ways of accomplishing the inexplicit and therefore never-attainable goals of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”, always requiring more people to carry on the work. So by now “the average university has more than 45 people devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion” [7].
The sad current state of affairs is described succinctly and accurately by Bret Stephens, in the context of Claudine Gay and Harvard:
“Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas. . . . a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections. If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the [Supreme] court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.” [8]
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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/opinion/claudine-gay-resignation-racism.html
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/dei-college-director-fired-not-being-right-kind-black-person-1813481
[3] https://archive.ph/ZVjEt#selection-69.0-69.36
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20131030115950/http://fbox.vt.edu/faculty/aaup/index4.html
[5] Paul Weinstein Jr., “Administrative Bloat At U.S. Colleges Is Skyrocketing”, 28 August 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/administrative-bloat-at-us-colleges-is-skyrocketing/?sh=6621d6ae41d2
[6] “Administrative Bloat in Higher Education: Is This Now a Higher Education Industrial Complex?” 9 May 2023 ~ CSUFSENATEFORUM (California State University, Fullerton); https://thesenateforum.wordpress.com/2023/05/09/administrative-bloat-in-higher-education-is-this-now-a-higher-education-industrial-complex
[7] Jay P. Greene, “Administrative bloat at universities raises costs without helping students”, 24 August 2021;
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/administrative-bloat-universities-raises-costs-without-helping-students
[8] Bret Stephens, “Claudine Gay and the limits of social engineering at Harvard”, 2 January 2024;
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/opinion/harvard-claudine-gay-resignation.html