Over the last decade, an acronym has swept through most of American education — DEI, which stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” It doesn’t have any exact meaning, but stands for a farrago of leftist notions that call for radical socioeconomic change. DEI is against the free market, against freedom of speech, and against evaluating people on their individual merits. DEI enthusiasts have been trained in our colleges and universities, usually in identity programs, schools of education, and other ideological fever swamps of “progressivism.”
In this superb piece on The Hill, Robert Maranto, Michael Mills, and Catherine Salmon look at this disturbing phenomenon.
How bad have things gotten? The authors write, “For example, one-fifth of the advertisements for higher education faculty jobs (and more for prestigious posts) require applicants to write statements of allegiance to DEI. Academic employment often depends on DEI relevant presentations at scholarly conferences and publications in scholarly journals. Increasingly, scholars are required to explain in advance how their research supports DEI. Such litmus tests are traditionally associated with totalitarian regimes and, in America, with McCarthyism.”
The DEI zealots act like a tribe that intends to exclude anyone from higher education who isn’t in their group. Anyone who questions DEI is obviously defective in some way, probably a racist or a defender of capitalist exploitation. Not suited to work in education.
DEI is a lousy set of ideas, but as the old saying goes, you can’t beat something with nothing, so Maranto, Mills, and Salmon suggest a new acronym: MFE (Merit, Fairness, and Equality). They write, “Under MFE, academic decisions are based primarily on academic merit, well validated standardized test scores, grades and, for faculty, publication and teaching records. Individuals are primarily evaluated on their achievements, not by their group identities. This respects individual dignity and promotes the primary mission of research in higher education: the production of knowledge.”
Most Americans would strongly prefer MFE over DEI if the choice were explained to them.