The University of Michigan's DEI -- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion -- push has cost a quarter of a billion dollars over the last eight years, writes Nicholas Confessore in the New York Times Magazine. Yet, "even on the largely left-learning campus," it meets with "wary disdain."
Professors must submit a DEI statement to be hired, then do training in "antiracist pedagogy." Most students must take at least one class on “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.”
Michigan’s largest division . . . dispenses handouts on "White Supremacy Culture,” such as “worship of the written word," writes Confessore. The English department's land acknowledgment describes its core subject as “a language brought by colonizers to North America.” From engineering to business, UM is devoted to DEI.
Yet, in a campus survey published last year, "students reported a decline in their sense of belonging compared to a 2016 survey." The campus climate was worse, they said.
“The surveys are so weird,” one student told the reporter. “They only ask, are we doing enough DEI? Or should we do it more?”
"For a large swath of students and professors, Michigan’s D.E.I. initiatives have become simply background noise, like the rote incantations of a state religion," Confessore writes.
People complained of "a culture of grievance" in which "everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements . . . were cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding administrative intervention."
Professors say they're going to more meetings, filling out forms and avoiding topics that some students might consider upsetting or "harmful" or a "microaggression." One professor was attacked for having a student read aloud a 1950s' legal opinion with the word "Negro."
Michigan voters banned racial preferences in public education in 2006. The percentage of black undergraduates at University of Michigan fell to the 4 to 5 percent range, and has remained there. Black student leaders told Confessore that DEI was "superficial" and insufficiently devoted to "blackness."
DEI is "under withering attack" across the country, writes Confessore. "At least a dozen states have banned or limited DEI programs at public universities." (Some corporations are scaling back DEI initiatives too.)
Some universities, including MIT and Harvard, have decided to stop requiring job candidates to submit "diversity statements." But Michigan has "redoubled its efforts," launching DEI 2.0 a year ago, and hiring even more DEI staffers.
Many faculty members Confessore interviewed "worried that Michigan’s press to ingrain D.E.I. into their scholarship — the diversity statements, the special fellowships, the clamor for research into contemporary social-justice issues — had narrowed its departments rather than broadening them." Subjects and eras "that couldn’t be jammed into an equity framework were being left to wither," they said. "Even academics from minority backgrounds felt they had to present themselves as scholars of equity in order to advance."
DEI is supposed to empower students, he writes. But "some researchers argue that teaching students to view the world chiefly through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable" instead.
According to political scientist Kevin Wallsten, the larger a university's DEI bureaucracy, the "more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students."
It's an impressive piece of reporting. Read the whole thing.