The Left has long sought to control education so as to shape the minds of students, making them receptive to the blandishments of socialism. In recent years, that effort has accelerated with the Diversity Equity, Inclusion (DEI) agenda. All three words sound innocent, but the underlying philosophy is adamantly anti-American.
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Bruce Gilley examines the rapid spread of DEI. In particular, he wants to measure its spread. He writes: “The oft-heard complaint that a given institution has been “taken over” by DEI raises the question of whether such a takeover is the same and is equally extensive in all places. Surely not, and if we can compare the worst affected to the least affected, perhaps there are lessons to be learned about the conditions that cause DEI to spread or be arrested.”
Gilley’s organization, the Oregon Association of Scholars, has developed a diagnostic tool that’s meant to enable people to see how far DEI has entrenched itself — the extent to which it has a fixed status on a campus. The tool measures the penetration of DEI into administrations, faculty affairs, student affairs, and libraries.
He admits that he and his colleagues didn’t think of everything, such as the possibility (recently advanced by some professors) that schools should start to demand “diversity statements” by applicants so they can filter out any who don’t seem to be dedicated to “social justice.”
Gilley concludes:
To return to the cancer analogy, DEI is like a particularly aggressive form of cancer that can jump from patient to physician, thus rendering the physician incapable of treating either the disease or himself (sorry, ‘zirself’). In that sense, our DEI-sickness diagnostic tool will play a dual role: charting and measuring the spread of DEI institutionalization on campus in a way that allows us to make comparisons and treat the disease and providing a model and example of what it means to uphold Western Enlightenment values in an age when the very idea of truth is being infected with a painful malignancy. If we don’t act, it will eventually kill off the patient entirely.