DEI imperatives have completely infested the California state university system from top to bottom.
On Friday, the New York Times published a truly shocking piece that nevertheless slid by my transom unnoticed until last night. Entitled “D.E.I. Statements Stir Debate on College Campuses,” it begins with the depressing tale of University of Toronto psychology professor Yoel Inbar, who was recently denied a position at the University of California, Los Angeles despite having been already evaluated as highly qualified and mooted to join the faculty.
His crime? You have already guessed it’s related to the ever-escalating antics of university Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion administrators and activists, and you are not wrong. But it’s even more outrageous than the standard-issue story: Inbar happily submitted a “diversity statement” that used all the proper language and ticked every box as required, but was blocked from joining when a cadre of activist graduate students discovered that, once on his podcast years ago, he had opposed the idea of requiring them for academic hires. The activist mobs usually rule at California schools — Stanford recently had to send its entire law school class to mandatory remedial education on how to tolerate conservative viewpoints — and when over 50 graduate students signed a petition denouncing his potential hiring, Professor Inbar’s application was suddenly and summarily denied. He remains in Canada, a cruel fate for any man.
That story could be viewed as merely one more anecdote in a saga traced by observers of academia’s increasing madness and intellectual authoritarianism. What makes the Times piece different is that it then expands into a much larger examination of how DEI imperatives have completely infested the California state university system from top to bottom, at every aspect of the hiring and teaching experience. The entire article should be read — and credit where due, it is remarkable to see this sort of tough news piece coming from the New York Times — but a few key excerpts will suffice to explain the depth of the rot within the California system, a rot now spreading across the country with lightning speed:
Candidates who did not “look outstanding” on diversity, the vice provost at U.C. Davis instructed his search committees, could not advance, no matter the quality of their academic research. Credentials and experience would be examined in a later round. . . .
At Berkeley, a faculty committee rejected 75 percent of applicants in life sciences and environmental sciences and management purely on diversity statements, according to a new academic paper by Steven Brint, a professor of public policy at U.C. Riverside, and Komi Frey, a researcher for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has opposed diversity statements. Candidates who made the first cut were repeatedly asked about diversity in later rounds. “At every stage,” the study noted, “candidates were evaluated on their commitments to D.E.I.”
According to a report by Berkeley, Latino candidates constituted 13 percent of applicants and 59 percent of finalists. Asian and Asian American applicants constituted 26 percent of applicants and 19 percent of finalists. Fifty-four percent of applicants were white and 14 percent made it to the final stage. Black candidates made up 3 percent of applicants and 9 percent of finalists.
Brian Soucek, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a leading academic defender of D.E.I. policies, sat on a hiring committee during this time and described the searches as “a partially successful experiment.”
That last quote wins an award for political understatement. If the goal was to reduce the number of white or Asian faculty hires by simply screening them out of the process, then surely Soucek should be doing the rhetorical equivalent of landing a jet fighter on the UC-Davis quad and delivering a “Mission Accomplished” speech to a throng of cheering DEI administrators, no? What work is plausibly yet to be done? He can hardly be disappointed with the statistical results. “People realized that the traditional order of reading applications need not be set in stone,” he clarifies to the Times, suggesting that the old way — reviewing academic records, research achievements, publications, and the like — should be superseded by a far more rigorous rubric: random chance of birth.
I am left wondering what our next generation of doctors and scientists will look like, trained by American institutions staffed with professors and research scientists who are steeping them from their earliest to their most critically formative moments in a toxic and intellectually suffocating milieu where all present have been screened either for their desirable racial and sexual characteristics or their ability to demonstrate fulsome and abject fealty to this approach. Because that is the world these people are constructing.
I am not optimistic. I don’t take the occasionally alarmist gibes I hear about how “in a generation we’ll no longer even know how to build [X]” seriously, if for no other reason than projects involving engineering, mathematics, and the hard sciences tend to have pretty strict metrics for success (and fairly significant consequences — this is extreme understatement — for failure). But even if the engineering and hard sciences are more resilient to such pressures, they are not immune, and if nothing else a talent pool artificially drained of many of its most talented applicants is going to result in fewer and lesser achievements, whether in practical or theoretical research.
And even more grimly, in other fields the decline will be disguised — reflected only indirectly over time in statistics like life expectancy, infant mortality, or suicide and addiction rates. There is no way that scientific (and particularly medical and psychological) fields permeated by these standards — where mere expressions of dissent or insufficient fealty, to say nothing of entire avenues of research altogether, incur permanent professional cost — will not be negatively and seriously affected in the long run. That will have concrete real-world results as these newer generations churned out by our educational system mature into power and the older generations retire.
This is a story few are telling (or are capable of telling, allowed to tell, interested in telling, etc.), but one day it will become our reality. Imagine this crop as the “senior generation” of science. (If you really want to sleep well, imagine them fielding the next global pandemic 30 years from now.) Some states like Florida under Ron DeSantis have attempted to put safeguards in place — forbidding state universities from requiring diversity statements for hiring, among other measures — but it is hard not to believe that a culture so overwhelming in the most powerful and prestigious corners of the academy will eventually spread almost everywhere, by cultural osmosis. I fear that the next few generations of American research science and medical care, as practiced by the products of our current system, will be a dim chapter in our country’s intellectual history.