Posted on 02/05/2025 7:11:10 AM PST by karpov
The University of Michigan’s recent about-face on DEI is both encouraging and instructive. Yes, even high-profile institutions with long records of supporting racial favoritism and radical ideological movements can show common sense—but sometimes it takes public humiliation in the media and losses in courtrooms to get them to budge.
After last month’s first set of executive orders from President Donald Trump, other schools would do well to drop DEI before experiencing the embarrassment that rattled Ann Arbor.
In December, UMichigan officials announced that they would no longer ask job applicants to submit “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) statements as part of their applications.
This announcement was significant because the school had a longstanding commitment to DEI, having spent some $250 million on DEI operations over the last eight years. Indeed, reporter Nicholas Confessore described Michigan’s original DEI program as part of the vanguard in the higher-education DEI revolution. Similarly, Heritage Foundation researcher Jay Greene found that the Wolverines had more DEI employees than any other university in a Power 5 athletic conference. Even today, according to just-released research, the school’s DEI payroll contains more than 1,100 names.
Yet, in 2019, the school settled a lawsuit filed by the free-speech-advocacy organization Speech First against the school’s bias-response team (BRT). BRTs and DEI offices are linked because DEI offices often oversee or otherwise support such activities at colleges. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a statement of interest in Speech First’s claims regarding UMichigan’s BRT, describing the team as one that had “chill[ed] … protected speech.”
As the court case was underway in 2018-19, state lawmakers were adopting provisions that banned BRTs and other forms of censorship such as free-speech zones. (Such zones create the impression or reality that free speech isn’t permitted elsewhere.)
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
“bias response team” do they have a Ghostbusters looking vehicle?
DIE Vampire! DEI!
BTTT
Except for the NFL, which embraces DEI.
“Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again” (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Evil cannot be forever defeated this side of Judgement Day. There’s always another Joe Biden or someone waiting to come along and force DEI down everyone’s throats again. Vigilance is the only solution in this imperfect world.
It’s like Cancer. The best you can do is to put it into remission.
DEI is/was just a repackaged, renamed and camouflaged “affirmative action” on steroids.
And just before that, “affirmative action” was a euphemism for “quotas”. And we thought affirmative action was banished.
Trump may very well kill DEI, but the 64k question is how will it reincarnate itself? - because the passions that created affirmative action and DEI are not going away. They may be going under the radar for a while, to regroup and strategize, but it’s almost guaranteed that they will be back.
And the even more important 64k question is, what human predisposition is the source of these passions, these forces and motives?
(Hint - it’s the same human trait that drives Marxism, which is...?)
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