THE DIVERSITY BOONDOGGLE FORTS UP IN THE CASTLE KEEP?

Sometimes, you feel like the bailey:  universities repurpose their affirmative action office as "affirmative action and diversity resources" in order to expand the mission to pronoun protocols and slagging on toxic masculinity.

Sometimes you fort up in the motte:  Don't fret, "DEI" is simply the contemporary acronym for what we once understood as "civil rights."  Who can object to that?  Case in point:  "Costco successfully defends its diversity policies as other US companies scale theirs back."The directors' rationale?

The directors’ message to shareholders details how having diverse employees and suppliers has, in their view, fostered “creativity and innovation in the merchandise and services that we offer” and led to greater customer satisfaction among Costco members.

In advance of the meeting, Neil Saunders, managing director of consulting firm GlobalData’s retail division, said Costco can be confident the proposal [to scale back the diversity office] will be rejected.

“I think people generally have confidence in Costco’s management, and there’s an attitude of ‘Why rock the boat? It’s sailing very nicely,’” Saunders said.

Costco’s public stance in support of diversity, equity and inclusion programs contrasts with the positions taken in recent months by other big consumer brands, including Walmart, McDonald’s and John Deere.

Costco are a shopping club for limousine liberals, dear reader.  If your membership dues come with a helping of Virtue Signalling Smug, so much the better, although note that the directors' message uses the language of the early affirmative action era.  That might not play so well with businesses that function more like common carriers, or "public accommodations" if you will, and managers might notice.  But people and organizations that buy shares with the goal of affecting corporate policy might object.

Last week, more than 30 Walmart shareholders, including Amalgamated Bank and Oxfam America, asked the CEO of the nation’s largest retailer to explain the business impact of curbing the company’s DEI policies, a move they called “disheartening.”

Prominent technology companies, including Amazon and Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — also have rolled back DEI initiatives, which are expected to face opposition from the administration of President Donald Trump.

Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action at colleges and universities, conservative groups have filed lawsuits making similar arguments about corporations, targeting initiatives such as employee resource groups and hiring practices that prioritize historically marginalized groups.

Similarly, J. P. Morgan's Jamie Dimon similarly defends his company's policies using the older language.

“We are going to continue to reach out to the Black community, Hispanic community, the LGBT community, the veterans community,” he said, speaking Wednesday from the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “And wherever I go, red states, blue states, green states, mayors, governors and they said they like what we do.”

If you're hiring faculty at Notre Dame (No Luck Needed) you'd like to continue the full Critical Studies treatment, but the prudent thing to do is take a step toward the keep.

An official from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana recently stated that Catholic identity and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) characteristics are “equally important” considerations when it comes to hiring new faculty, sparking criticism.

The National Catholic Register obtained an email sent to faculty on Jan. 17 by John McGreevy, Notre Dame’s provost, which described the school’s hiring priorities.

“Excellence in research and teaching is our fundamental and indispensable criterion for faculty appointments, but the complexity of our mission requires us to do even more,” McGreevy stated.

The email states that being Catholic and being a member of an “underrepresented minority” are equally important criteria in faculty hiring decisions.

“One important goal is to hire Catholic faculty and other faculty deeply committed to our mission to ensure continuity with our past and our future as the world’s leading global Catholic research university,” McGreevy explained. “A second overlapping and equally important goal is to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities on our faculty so that we become the diverse and inclusive intellectual community our mission urges us to be.”

The email concludes by stating that the Provost’s Office will “publish guidance to support academic units in their pursuit of these goals.”

That's going over with some Notre Dame students about as well as a 63 yard field goal attempt.

The motte and bailey tactic is dishonest. It advertises one thing that is easy to convince people to support (motte), but really contains much more that is harder to convince people to support (bailey). So long as people think that they’re supporting the motte and don’t see, or have convinced themselves of the absence of the bailey, they are support things they otherwise might not.

Now that you’ve learned about the motte and bailey tactic, see where you can spot it. It gets used all the time.

The dissident students spotted it.

Michael Canady, the editor-in-chief of The Irish Rover, a student newspaper at Notre Dame, for example, criticized the email.

Canady stated: “By prioritizing race and gender at a level ‘equally important’ to Catholicism, this policy of DEI hiring sacrifices the university’s character for the sake of the meaningless buzzwords ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion,’” reported The National Catholic Register.

Interestingly, even as the DOGE boys go after the excesses of the diversity boondoggle, some people you'd think might object aren't objecting.

The Department of Education on Friday canceled $15 million in federal grants that were used to fund diversity programs at three universities, according to information provided by a department official, the latest move in the Trump administration's efforts to defund DEI.

The universities—California State University, Los Angeles; Virginia Commonwealth University; and the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota—had received a series of grants for their education schools under the Biden administration. Ostensibly meant for teacher training and development, the grants were in fact used to support courses and workshops on DEI concepts—including "white privilege," "systemic racism," and "linguistic supremacy"—as well as the establishment of a "social justice" center.

The awards were part of the over $1 billion that the Biden Education Department spent on diversity programs in American schools, nearly half of which went to grants for race-based hiring.

Put another way, the recipients of those grants were cavorting in the fields outside the bailey's fences.  Look who didn't mind them being summoned inside.

While DOGE's other cuts have been more controversial—especially its gutting of USAID—the team's assault on DEI has ruffled relatively few feathers. Some on the Left have cheered the rollback, arguing it is a chance to get rid of the rhetoric that has alienated moderate and working-class voters from the Democratic Party.

"I am definitely happy this stuff is buried for now," Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of the socialist magazine Jacobin, told the New York Times in an interview. "I hope it doesn't come back."

Trump has promised to put universities front and center of his DEI crackdown, encouraging federal agencies to investigate schools with endowments over $1 billion. The grant cancellations are a sign that the reckoning will reach beyond the Ivy League and change the culture even of less elite schools, nearly all of which receive federal aid.

"Institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called 'diversity, equity, and inclusion,'" one of Trump's first executive orders reads. "Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex."

Make whatever you wish, dear reader, of the use of the Student Affairs phrasing in that order.