Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Sailer of the National Association of Scholars exposes the way DEI ideology has penetrated Texas A&M. And it isn’t in one of those fluffy fields like sociology — it’s in biology.
Sailer begins, “At Texas Tech University, a candidate for a faculty job in the department of biological sciences was flagged by the department’s search committee for not knowing the difference between ‘equality’ and ‘equity.’ Another was flagged for his repeated use of the pronoun ‘he’ when referring to professors. Still another was praised for having made a ‘land acknowledgment’ during the interview process. A land acknowledgment is a statement noting that Native Americans once lived in what is now the United States.”
Leftist ideology now pervades just about everything in our colleges and universities. Not so long ago, Texas A&M would have discriminated against faculty applicants because they were of the wrong race. Today, the discrimination is against applicants for having the wrong beliefs about politics.
I like Sailer’s conclusion: “The evidence shows that diversity statements function as political litmus tests, but it’s worse than that. Heavily valuing DEI while selecting cell biologists, virologists and immunologists constitutes a massive failure of priority. This is an issue of academic freedom, and it is a degradation of higher education.”
A degradation indeed. Academic departments should not be allowed to discard good people just because they aren’t ideological clones of those who are in power.