by Sidney Secular
February 1, 2023
The burgeoning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement is casting a miasmic, suffocating cloud upon the body politic and all Americans are suffering from it. Academia is the breeding ground for this strain of nonsense and its tentacles lead academic effort away from true academic pursuits. As an example: the thumb-sucking bureaucracy at the University of Virginia employs 77 people at a cost of $7 million per year to create, monitor and determine the University’s DEI program(s). And what do all these (very well paid) people do all day? What are their goals? What their intentions? Will they only be happy if they are totally surrounded by people who aren’t white; that is, when they achieve a 100% non-white staff and student body? Of equal importance is the question, what is the effect of the DEI movement on freedom of speech or educational programs on campus? All of these things affect the “education” that is supposedly being offered at UVA but little is said about the impact of the movement as a whole on that institution!
But the said $7 million is just the tip of the iceberg as it is only concerned with the most visible manifestation of the infestation of the DEI philosophy. It only counts salaries but not employee benefits, or office overhead, or the cost of outside consultants and speakers, or the cost of seminars and conferences! But perhaps even more important, it doesn’t reflect the impact of the program on faculty productivity or morale. An extraordinary amount of activity at the University is devoted to “running” DEI, and that time and effort acts as a massive drain, sucking faculty, students, and non-DEI staff into its vortex and subtracting from the educational efforts that are (supposedly) the mission of the University.
A “core anchor” of this monstrous matrix is the group, “Academic Deans for Diversity and Inclusion,” a bureaucracy with its own web page and, undoubtedly, a long list of “classified” records that keep track of those who run afoul of the group’s agenda. In any event, the following bullet points were pulled from its page illustrating how and where the deans are spending their time and effort:
- Strategic inclusive excellence planning; (Wow! What a whopper of loony lingo!)
- Key training events and D&I programming for the University;
- Policy equity reviews;
- Building for a cultural climate of belonging (get a dog if you want to feel needed);
- Student, staff and faculty recruitment and success (Eh, what?);
- Institutional communications focused on DEI
That’s more than the usual amount of academic claptrap and thus leaves one to wonder what is actually going on as well as what is actually being accomplished and most important, what is being destroyed in this convoluted process.
Obviously, there must be lots of planning, initiatives undertaken, meetings, networking, academic courses created, staged and attended, brainstorming (if you can call it that under the circumstances!) on WOKE ideas, and bureaucratic make-work. There must also be much virtue signaling, scoring brownie points, and resume-building all of which leaves far less time left for actual teaching and research on non-trivial/non-trendy – that is basic – subjects.
The College of Arts and Sciences is similarly consumed with DEI projects which probably overlap with those of the aforesaid academic deans. Energy is probably expended on saying the same things other departments are saying but in a way that makes them sound original, or different to a degree. The McIntire School of Commerce and the University of Virginia Library also have their own websites where they can mimic what the other departments are saying on DEI. The entire university is thus caught up in a Maoist-like perpetual politically driven endeavor where the various departments try to comply with the latest imperatives lest they fall behind in the race to keep up with the accomplishments of the other departments on race and DEI issues. It becomes a sort of “race on race.”
It’s time the university’s “stakeholders” – taxpayers, parents, students, deans, faculty and alumni – ask the essential questions for which answers are demanded and then weigh the costs – financial, academic and principled – against the putative benefits of this all-consuming farcical “crusade” against reality. This same inane and insane activity must be consuming nearly all of WOKE academia at this point – and remember, all of academia is WOKE! And as that is the case, the question then must be, what will be the end result of this whirlwind of weirdness? Frankly, the answer to that is about as simple as it gets: the destruction of academia and those who people it including America’s future generations.
© 2023 Sidney Secular – All Rights Reserved
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