Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — pleasant words that are supposed to help improve college campuses. Students will feel more welcomed. Everyone will get along. Smiley faces all over.
Oh, but it doesn’t work out that way. In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Scott Yenor looks at the results of decades of DEI at Texas A&M. Starting in the 1990s, the university’s leadership went all in for this, but the latest “climate report” finds that students now feel less at home, less comfortable than before.
Yenor writes, “Interestingly enough, however, efforts to cultivate a more welcoming climate backfired. According to TAMU’s own measures, the campus climate was worse in 2020 than it was in earlier years. As the following chart shows, fewer whites, blacks and Hispanics felt like Aggies in 2020 than they did in 2015 or 2017.”
And what’s the reaction from the school’s leader? Of course — more DEI.
Yenor observes, “If inclusion meant actual inclusion, then the survey results might have provoked sober second thoughts. Instead, the reaction reveals that the TAMU DEI regime has never been about making everyone feel welcome on campus. It has been about imposing leftist ideology on everyone, so that activists would dominate the campus life. . . . Curricula must cater to their ideological demands rather than the collective wisdom of the ages.”
Precisely. DEI is a Trojan horse for bringing in an ideology that is hostile to all aspects of our civilization. We need to oust the people who have done this and install new leaders who will return higher education to actual education.