I just recently heard about 2 foundations that had previously earmarked grant money to fund programs that actually tangibly help underprivileged minorities have instead decided to reallocate those funds to vague, intangible Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity initiatives.

It's almost as if all of these frightened people have somehow convinced themselves that our ever growing material inequities and spatial inequality of resources will somehow miraculously solve themselves if only we require everyone granted entry to the professional managerial class to pledge their supposed allegiance to the corporate blackfacewashing goals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity.

No need to tax the rich to feed and house the poor if only we can all learn to mouth the oligarch-approved platitudes.

Excerpt:

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Last Friday, the New York Times published a truly depressing piece entitled “D.E.I. Statements Stir Debate on College Campuses.” It begins by relating the tale of University of Toronto psychology professor Yoel Inbar, who was recently denied a position at the University of California, Los Angeles despite being a shoo-in for the job and acing his interviews.

You may have already guessed that Inbar was passed up for reasons having to do with the Left’s sacrosanct Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion trinity. What makes his story all the more outrageous, however, is that he happily submitted a “diversity statement” that used all the right buzzwords and ticked all the right boxes, but was blocked from joining after a platoon of activist graduate students discovered that, on his podcast five years ago, Inbar had opposed the idea of requiring DEI statements for academic hires. Like Red Guards with a hair-trigger sensitivity for sniffing our heresy, such cadres of Left-modernist offense archaeologists insist on the most condemnatory interpretations of a person’s motives when the canonical totems of race, gender, and sexuality are transgressed. In Inbar’s case, 50 of these little woke jihadists signed a petition denouncing his potential hiring,1 and his application was summarily denied.

That story could be viewed as just the latest example of academia’s growing intellectual authoritarianism. What makes the Times piece different is that it then examines how DEI imperatives now thoroughly pervade the entire California university system, an infestation that has quickly spread across the country. According to the article, nearly half of the large colleges in America require that job applicants write DEI statements.2 “Universities have hired hundreds of administrators, who monitor compliance with hiring goals and curricular changes, and many departments write a variation on a D.E.I. policy.”

The vice provost at U.C. Davis has instructed search committees that candidates who don’t “look outstanding” on diversity cannot advance, no matter the quality of their academic research. Credentials and experience are examined only in later rounds. At Berkeley, a faculty committee rejected 75% of applicants in life sciences/environmental sciences and management purely on diversity statements. And the candidates who made the first cut were repeatedly asked about diversity in later rounds. “At every stage,” a study noted, “candidates were evaluated on their commitments to D.E.I.”

It’s pretty obvious that DEI statements are ideological purity tests. Requiring them is no different than requiring a progressive loyalty pledge. But what’s particularly horrifying about all this is that screening applicants for their desirable racial and sexual characteristics or their ability to demonstrate fulsome and abject fealty to social justice imperatives will have very real-world effects—especially in the hard science fields. A talent pool artificially drained of many of its most talented applicants will result in practical and theoretical research that’s suppressed or not even conducted, with the consequences imposed on the populace and hidden in statistics over time (life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.). It’s simply inevitable that the standards imposed by the DEI regime, in which dissent and insufficient enthusiasm for progressive orthodoxy incur permanent professional cost, will result in society being negatively and seriously affected in the long run.

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I am not knowing.