LET THAT HARD RAIN FALL.

Dear reader, my jape at higher education hoping to wordsmith a statement that higher education had not lost the plot was not hyperbolic.  Look no further than the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, where Ralina Joseph, the vice provost of inclusive excellence (yeah, let's have the Special Olympians skate against Team U.S.A.) at U.C.L.A. (motto: On! Wisconsin!) offers, presumably in all seriousness, "Why Higher Ed Shouldn’t Mourn the Death of DEI."  The sub-heading is a canonical example of deanlet profundity.  "The end of performative activism can yield to a different approach, one that distributes accountability for inclusion across every member of the institution."

What follows, though, is a confession that higher education has lowered itself.

What would the rapid rise and even quicker fall of DEI mean for those dedicated scholars and administrators who had devoted their lives to transforming the university, to making it an institution that reflects the totality of our community? Notably, there was no mournful wailing, no gnashing of teeth. My peers did not decry the end of DEI.

To be sure, they were exhausted by the orchestrated and mean-spirited attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion. They missed being able to speak forthrightly about inequality. They yearned for the university’s declared commitment to equitable changemaking and the funding that followed. But this group did not bear allegiance to the three reviled/revered letters, D-E-I.

Put another way, Normals got tired of being blamed for everything that was wrong in the world, and for being denied the opportunity to raise counter-arguments based on evidence.  The best this senior deanlet can do is admit to excessive zeal on the part of the True Believers who unleashed the rage mobs.

For my part, I felt liberated by their fierce energy and wondered whether this dire time could help us build something new, something bolder and better as we freed ourselves from the aspects of DEI many of us never wanted. From sympathetic words unaccompanied by empathetic action. From the tendency to place the burden of creating more inclusive spaces upon the very people left out of privileged spaces. From DEI’s grandiloquent statements that never brought meaningful change to policy or practice or procedure.

Could this new era, with all its anxieties and attempts at producing chaos, actually portend increased opportunity because we can now relieve ourselves of the many things that didn’t work?

No.  But if you're striving for inclusive excellence, you have to exclude the less excellent.

With the zealousness of new converts, mainstream industries throughout our country—higher education, corporations, health care, government, law firms—largely presented the DEI of the early 2020s as a new intervention. This ignored its roots in movements ranging from civil rights, through the 1960s- and ’70s-era freedom struggles for race, gender, sexuality and disability rights, and more recently, through Black Lives Matter. Moreover, DEI handed over the mike, but not the keys, to some specially chosen spokespeople (whom communication scholar Subrina Robinson calls “spoketokens”)—people of color, LGBTQ folks and, notably, white women (who, as the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action, also disproportionately occupied the ranks of chief diversity officer posts at the height of DEI, as one report estimated that three-quarters of all CDOs were white and just over half were female).

In the DEI era, many institutions made statements of outrage and proclamations of change that remained unattached to metrics: It was aspirational, handed down from above. Deliverables remained murky, the work siloed. This approach did not sufficiently empower those who had been fighting for decades, both inside and outside their institutions, to incorporate systemwide changes or create collective action.

Instead, responsibility and emotional labor lay with the few instead of the whole. Many had been doing this work for decades and were burned out by continuing demands on their expertise and the inability of institutions to commit to meaningful change. Many were experiencing what I have diagnosed as racial exhaustion.

Gee, lady, we could have told you about AWFULs.  Her conclusion, though, answers, in the affirmative, a question Rob Jenkins asked for Minding the Campus.  "Is College Making People Stupider?"  His answer? "Yes," and the Blogfather quips, "All signs point to yes."  Which is where "inclusive excellence" takes you.

Inclusive excellence means ensuring that every space at the university is for all of us. It’s not about a single faculty member solely advocating for a curriculum that reflects all. It’s not about a single staff person speaking up about an unfairly administered policy. It’s not about a solitary student bearing the burden of representing their entire culture in a classroom. Inclusive excellence means all of us are actively engaging our entire community for the inclusion of that whole community. We all must evaluate what barriers are in place and then work to dismantle them.

Mr Jenkins, who is engaging in polemics, isn't seeing it.

I recognize that some young people need to go to college to pursue their chosen profession. I also believe a solid liberal arts education, if you can find one, has great intrinsic value. But for too many, a college education seems to have devolved into a net negative. They come out with a degree that signifies few if any real skills, believing absurd things like men can become women and collectivism is the path to freedom.

Sadly, they couldn’t get any stupider even if they did somehow make it to Jupiter.

Perhaps, though, as Southern California's Shaun Harper contends, the classroom isn't where the learning (learing?) takes place.  "Effective Responses to Feedback About Culturally Irrelevant Out-of-Class Activities."  No, it's not about the foolishness of the likes of Ralina Joseph and Marilyn Monteiro and Melissa Click deploying the cancel mobs to cancel Ann Coulter or Riley Gaines.  Although perhaps offering a more eclectic range of programming might fix the "disengagement and low attendance" the columnist wishes to address.

I am a longtime proponent of ensuring that all collegians have equitable opportunities to benefit from participation in campus clubs, activities and leadership roles. But as consistently noted across the first three editions of my best-selling book, Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Diverse Populations, they do not. There are myriad explanations for this. One is the unavailability of meaningful out-of-class experiences that diverse groups of undergraduates deem sufficiently responsive to their cultural interests.

Disengagement and low attendance rates are two powerful ways that collegians furnish feedback to campus activities professionals and to their student leader peers who are responsible for programming. Two weeks ago, a colleague told me that Black and Latino undergraduates at her university are often asked what they want, but they do not subsequently show up to events. It could be that too few of them are being surveyed about their interests, I speculated. Or that not enough of those students’ programmatic recommendations are being implemented. It also could be that student leaders are designing and delivering programs that too heavily reflect their own personalities and preferences, not those of peers who spend most of their out-of-class time isolated in residence hall rooms, scrolling social media or playing video games.

It's bad form to suggest that students are disengaged because they're not college material.  It might also be bad form to suggest that "student leaders" are careerists without character or knowledge.  It could be bad form to suggest that the students who don't go to scheduled programming have lives of their own and an ability to improvise things to do.  Read on, though, and discover that the columnist began an academic career as a careerist who knows all the talking points.

Students of color who participate in my research studies frequently report that campus events that are supposedly designed for all often miss the mark for them. As a former student body president, I take this feedback seriously. I recall desperately wanting to maximize the engagement of my peers when I was largely responsible for programming three decades ago.

Also, my first job in higher education was in a student activities office. Hence, I have long valued and appreciated the importance of high-quality educational, social and cultural experiences offered outside of classrooms. Student development and learning have always been my highest priorities, but I also want collegians to have fun. I have long insisted that access to fun should be equitable. Durable disengagement patterns among particular student populations make painstakingly clear that it is not.

In the mind of a careerist, continuing the potted identity politics is still the way forward.

I understand that student leaders on union boards and campus activities programming councils are primarily responsible for planning and executing events. However, casting a wider input net beyond that small group of student leaders would be advantageous. One way to approach this is via the establishment of programming advisory councils comprised of undergraduates whose participation rates in campus activities are routinely low—Black undergraduate men, international students, first-generation collegians, students who work off-campus jobs, commuters, students with disabilities, veterans and student athletes, to name a few.

There should be a separate council for each group, and every effort should be made to maximize within-group diversity—meaning, ensuring there is not an overrepresentation of student leaders or an underrepresentation of men, LGBTQ+ students, conservatives or collegians from faith groups beyond Christianity. If asked, there is a high likelihood that members of advisory councils will offer ideas that appeal to significantly higher numbers of peers who are like themselves. Also, if their ideas are ultimately implemented, more of them will surely participate in those activities and help recruit others.

Fine, keep up the purity tests and the quotas.  That does nothing to change the perception that higher education no longer is.  Let the hard rain fall.