THEY'LL NEVER LEARN.

Daily Economy contributor Paul Mueller welcomes the Trump administration's withdrawal of sanction from the diversity-incompetence complex, but cautions, "Companies admit DEI wasn’t good business, nor for those it purported to help. But DEI grifters and grievance peddlers won’t give up easily."  Particularly, he cautions, in higher education.

A deep irony of the DEI movement is its posturing as a movement of the downtrodden and disadvantaged simply asking for a fair shake. That’s not the case at all. Many working-class minorities are fed up with identity politics. White women, for example, seem to have benefited disproportionately from DEI priorities. Meanwhile, black people only hold about 4 percent of DEI positions. Perhaps that contributed to the share of black men voting for Trump in November doubling.

You know who are major DEI advocates? Millionaires (and in the case of Bloomberg and Soros, billionaires), also highly paid consultants at McKinsey & Co. and other consulting firms, highly influential university administrators, highly credentialed university faculty and medical professionals, the rank-and-file government employees, and, of course, DEI peddlers.

Academia remains rife with the ideologies that birthed DEI: critical race theory, cultural Marxism, intersectionality, and the like. Although a few universities have rolled back their commitment to DEI, for most DEI remains the dominant modus operandi. Though less prominent, and couched in other terms, DEI continues to be advanced in the halls of academia. And not just there. The enormous public K-12 education apparatus remains riddled with DEI, especially when it comes to transgender ideology.

He concludes, "Despite legal, political, and public opinion losses, the DEI establishment presses on for its own privileged, elite benefit."

Right on schedule, the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education rolls out trade association senior executive Marjorie Hass to exhort the deanlets and deanlings to double down.  "A Dear Colleague letter seeking to prohibit race-conscious DEI initiatives should push campus leaders to rethink their core programs."

Not by confessing the error I alluded to when I called it a career: "And the subtle denigration of mainstream white guys as less desirable hires or as majors continues."

Not by recognizing that stereotype threat might work in more than one direction.  "You cannot tell people over and over and over again that they are evil by virtue of their skin color without provoking this kind of reaction."

Rather, it's doubling down on the very identity-politics idiocies that put higher education in a bad odor in the first place.

This is a moment for campus leaders to reframe the terms of the current debate over the legitimacy of special diversity, equity and inclusion programs by doing the long-needed work of truly decentering whiteness as the normative identity and experience within so many campus curricula and co-curricular programs.

If we are to truly serve our students regardless of race, and if—as the department’s letter states—we have to put an end to even the subtle ways racial preferences and privileges are attached to seemingly race-blind policies, then watch out. Most campuses have a lot of work to do, and much of it is not going to be to the liking of those who believe that it is DEI programs that make an otherwise level playing field an unfair one.

Now maybe she's left some of the silly privilege shaming that often sails under the banner of "decentering whiteness" behind, e.g.

It might be more precise, and less provocative, to suggest that intersectionality theory produces testable hypotheses (do white people unconsciously perpetuate oppression?) whilst the course treats these as maintained hypotheses. (An alternative, if you're curious: there are survivals of kinship ties that offer ways for insiders to identify or to communicate trust with other insiders, to the exclusion of outsiders.) To Mr Esenberg, the course description comes off as dismissive of those other interpretations, which he suggests are unavailable thanks to higher education's epistemic closure.

And perhaps she's left behind the semantic sabotage that her colleagues in the area studies disciplines like to engage in.

And the intersectionality crowd, despite their continuing mission, to commit "semantic sabotage," to wit: "First, they call into question the cogency or authenticity of the concepts of tolerance and respect as traditionally understood. Second, they substitute a supposedly higher understanding of those virtues whose true effect is not to perfect but to undermine those virtues." is likely tainting the entire academic mission.  "When funding for these institutions is slashed due to plummeting public support — and it will be — they’ll blame 'anti-intellectualism.'"  If we get out of the current cold civil war as lightly as a few universities being closed, we might be getting off lightly.

To an extent, she's also backing away from the tragic notion that "whiteness" means things like tending to details, dealing honestly, and showing up on time.

They write about "decentering whiteness," whatever that means. If it's about buying into the aspirations of all students while encouraging them to buy into success strategies, fine.

Unfortunately, that's probably not what's at work.  In New York, public schools honcho Richard Carranza has spelled out what that "white supremacy culture" means.

Unfortunately, she substitutes bad history for bad programming.

What the Dear Colleague letter fails to mention is that the proliferation of DEI activities on campuses came about as a more or less conservative compromise position as the population grew more diverse and as students demanded greater access. In treating Black and other minoritized students as “special,” such programs meet the needs of these students in supplementary ways rather than by ensuring that the core curriculum and student life experience are equally useful, meaningful and available to all. If the department insists that we put an end to all DEI programming, then it will also have to support efforts to ensure that whiteness is not smuggled in as the norm or standard.

No, that's not at all how it started.  In the 1960s with the push for "relevance" (anybody remember Elphaba's Wellesley speech?) first came the affinity centers, primeval safe spaces, if you will, followed by the creation of the "studies" curricula, later formalized as departments, precisely to be free from the discourse practices of the established disciplines.

That "genteel notion of professionalism" suffices to protect the inquiry that goes on in "studies" departments or centers.  Researchers in literature or philosophy or political economy or sociology have ample opportunity to investigate and collaborate on the sort of "intersectional" questions the "studies" departments have arrogated to themselves; and, retaining affiliations in more traditional disciplines might provide precisely the sort of checks on one's speculations that the "studies" departments and their flying monkeys in Student Affairs have freed themselves from.  That has not turned out so well, has it?

Sooner or later using your status as a tenured protestor to hector and taunt Normals will go wrong.

I repeat: literature, philosophy, sociology: and the problems the "studies" departments now face are precisely because the protesters abandoned the disciplinary protections that protected them, and people noticed.  "Use your academic status to make a silly argument, on a non-private platform or wherever, brace yourself for the incoming. 'We don't refute people like this. We mock them. And we pity the students in their classes.'"  In my gloomier moments, I think the silliness is the point.  "Minor-attracted person?"  "Feminist mathematics?"

Sixty years ago, senior professors in the established disciplines, including many who agreed with many or all of the grievances of the "relevance" crowd, were still willing to have these "studies" departments established so as to maintain the illusion that their disciplines were serious.  Then Student Affairs came along, and "the core curriculum and the student life experience" are now equally pathetic for everybody.

It's a little late for Ms Hass to develop a conscience now.

Early in my teaching career, I saw the ways that DEI programs could be used to reinforce white centrality rather than challenge it. Student demands for a more representative and accurate curriculum were met with resistance by senior faculty uninterested in expanding their own spheres of knowledge. Special courses in “women’s history” or “Black studies” became the compromise position. Rather than revising the canon to reflect the needs of a curious student body, rather than incorporating new scholarship into the university’s core, rather than interrogating the biases and histories of the curriculum, new courses and departments were created while the original ones were left intact. This détente (you teach yours and I teach mine) became the model.

What did she do at the time?  Keep a low profile because she was still on the tenure track?  Go along to get along?  Learn a new word?  "Any scholar who uses "interrogate" as if some institutional concept ought be dragged into the Lubyanka for round-the-clock questioning and then dispatched with a small pistol."  That establishmentarian humanities and social science types shied away from the identity based curricula might have been in recognition for how faddish and empirically empty they were.

Or perhaps she's recognizing, a little late, that there is no such thing as a core curriculum any more.

They keep in place a curriculum and campus culture firmly centered around the interests and perspectives of white students while offering alternatives on the side. If compromise via DEI activities is no longer an option, then a better solution will have to be found. The diversity of the student body is a fact that will still require a reckoning. Decades of scholarship reveal the many ways whiteness is encoded in supposedly neutral policies and programs, and this will not be magically erased. For many colleges, achieving a campus where white students are not unintentionally given extra opportunities based on their race will require radical change.

On second thought, maybe she is using that "encoded whiteness" in the sense of attention to detail, showing up on time, and all the other bourgeois conventions you deconstruct at your own risk.