by Jeff Childers
Yesterday, the New York Times ran a long-form, magazine-style report, explicitly labeled as “investigative,” headlined “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” You might want to read this one. (I don’t often suggest reading NYT articles, either.)
Apart from Matt Walsh’s movie (“Am I Racist?”), nothing this year has more evidenced the promising advances in the conservative counter-revolution than this article springing from one of the wellsprings of DEI, which, as it turns out, is not, after all, Ponce De Leon’s fountain of eternal academic youth.
DEI is prematurely aging. It isn’t aging well.
The article described how no university in America embraced DEI as tightly and passionately as did the University of Michigan. In 2016, after Trump’s election, every single MichU department, hundreds and hundreds of them, were ordered to develop and staff comprehensive DEI radicalization plans.
Even the university’s plant nursery (the “Arboretum”) delivered a 37-page buzzword-packed diversity plan, born out of wedlock, which vowed to adopt “a polycentric paradigm, decentering singular ways of knowing and cocreating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horticultural modalities, Two-Eyed Seeing, Kinomaage and other cocreated power realignments.”
They are deadly serious, but that right there is a joke. I defy you to explain what that means in simple English. (Two-Eyed Seeing? Apart from BB gun accident victims and the mythical Cyclops, is there any other kind of seeing?) I also defy you to justify how a plant nursery could be so racist it had to be “fixed” in the first place.
The Times’ investigative journalist interviewed numberless faculty members, mostly unlucky teachers who the institutional DEI machine had masticated at one point or another. A common theme developed. The original architects and power brokers of MichU’s DEI industry refused to talk to the Times’ reporter. They sensed it was too dangerous.
A second theme bubbled up: white women were the worst. A “cartoon professor” was investigated by the University’s DEI police after students reported her for showing them a ‘racist’ cartoon (a 1960s political cartoon about Maoist repression). She told the Times she’d been reported by a group of female white students. “They want to do something — be a part of the cause,” the professor explained.
Another professor remarked that creating the DEI tipline and policing process was like handing tasers to a gang of six-year-old children. At times, the article swerved — almost certainly intentionally — toward Matt Walsh-levels of self-parody. For example:
As the article wrapped up, Michigan’s DEI administrators were fully exposed as clueless nitwits. The reporter quoted them defending the school’s horrible racial performance statistics, like dropping black enrollment and student surveys showing higher rates of racial angst and animus on campus. According to the DEI Administrators, these failing numbers show Michigan’s DEI programs are actually working because, paradoxically, when you “fix” racism it “stirs up anger and resentment.”
We always thought that racism was anger and resentment.
In sum, the Times’ story — again, well worth reading — conveyed a pervasive sense of dilapidation, as though the entire edifice of DEI is rotting from the inside, paint peeling off the walls, doors hanging from the hinges. Let us never forget that DEI was still under construction until the pandemic exposed the reprehensible ideology to appalled parents.
