River News: Our View

This past week, one of the nation’s leading repositories of whackism, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, otherwise known as a bastion of academic elitism, announced it was flushing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion down the toilet.

As an aside, and just FYI, at such elite institutions they don’t say “toilet.” It’s known as a comfort station, a place where all genders and transgenders are welcome to take relief. No word on what having biological males in women’s restrooms does to the comfort levels of women in those stations.

Just as obvious are the comfort levels among MIT donors when it comes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), comfort levels that have been lowered a great deal in the past few months. 

First, there was MIT president Sally Kornbluth’s disastrous congressional testimony revealing a cavalier attitude about antisemitism on her campus. Then, there has been her belated and until lately anemic response to encampments of protesters illegally occupying university grounds to call for genocide against Jews.

Something had to be done, and the obvious answer was to give the boot to DEI, specifically, an announcement that the university would no longer require job applicants to explain how they would enhance DEI if they were hired.

Kornbluth simply said the statements “don’t work.”

Now elimination of DEI loyalty oaths in hiring is actually a good thing. DEI faculty — or more accurately, ideological contractors — are a main reason universities are the disgrace they are today. The hiring only of leftist ideologues, and of far leftists at that, is a major reason our sons and daughters and grandkids have been radicalized on campus.

That’s why they’re sleeping in tents calling for the wholesale murder of a people rather than studying in the library.

Of course the DEI statements have also been used to silence faculty who didn’t agree with the left-wing narrative. They signed an oath, after all, and that guaranteed silence so long as those faculty wanted their careers to survive.

So, after MIT’s announcement, the mainstream media naturally spent a good part of the next few days trumpeting — for better or for worse — the university’s retreat from DEI, a turning point many called it.

And it would be a turning point … if MIT really was getting rid of DEI hires and programs, which it is not.

As it turns out, when Kornbluth said the DEI statements “don’t work,” she apparently did not mean DEI doesn’t work but that the statements themselves don’t work because they don’t guarantee the hiring of ideologically acceptable candidates.

The world is full of liars, you know.

The statement was a sham and an attempt at distraction. We know this because for the past few months MIT has been looking for and in March actually hired its brand-new and first ever vice president for — wait for it — Equity and Inclusion. New VP Karl Reid says his work is “fueled” by a desire to serve the “marginalized and underserved” — usually lingo for those whose opinions are so repulsive they have been marginalized by decent people — and he thanked Kornbluth for her “unwavering commitment to equity and belonging at the Institute.”

So much for getting rid of DEI. All of which brings us to Wisconsin. 

The only way to root out the pervasive radicalism at American universities — the current determination to ban and censor any other thought and to kill critical thinking and debate — is to dig deep into the bowels of those elite institutions and see exactly what they are doing.

That way change can be effected. Real DEI programs and actions can be eliminated, and steps can be taken to restore universities as authentic centers for higher learning and liberal discourse rather than as propaganda machines.

This week the Wisconsin legislature took a solid step in that direction when the Joint Legislative Audit Committee approved an audit of state-sponsored discrimination through DEI initiatives, both in the executive branch and in the University of Wisconsin-System. 

State Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Green Bay), the co-chairman of the audit committee, said the audit would identify exactly what the universities — as well as executive agencies in the Evers’ administration — are up to.

“We must ensure state agencies and the UW-System are efficiently utilizing taxpayer resources without regard for immutable characteristics,” he said. “This proposed audit has very clear goals of delving into the administration’s DEI initiatives — What did the agency do? How much did it cost? And what did it achieve?”

That’s much better than latching onto a press release from the agencies and the colleges that assure that DEI requirements are out, even as internally they press their DEI activities and demands ever harder.

The truth is, in Wisconsin the Evers’ administration and the UW-System are both shot through and through with DEI initiatives. Even as we write, the University system is planning its 2024 Diversity Forum, and over at UW-Milwaukee the division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is assuring everyone it is working hard to eliminate “equity gaps.”

Yeah, how? Hopefully, the audit will tell us.

It’s sure needed because such things as the deal that Assembly speaker Robin Vos reached with the UW System to limit the number of DEI positions is akin to MIT’s elimination of its binding DEI loyalty oath: It doesn’t mean much, not if the work of those positions is simply re-channeled and the DEI effort continues to unfold according to plan, albeit somewhat camouflaged.

Indeed, as backlash against DEI at universities — and against universities in general — continues to grow, the danger is that more and more DEI programs will go underground following pronouncements that they are being disbanded or curtailed.

In the months following Vos’s deal with the universities, as well as following the U.S. Supreme Court decision banning discrimination in admissions though the use of affirmative action programs, there was ongoing evidence that the UW-System was digging its heels in to defend DEI. Officials at UW-La Crosse, to cite just one example, reiterated their commitment to DEI and to keep on doing what they were doing, just in a more covert way.

In February, for example, speaking to the UW-La Crosse student union, Interim Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Stacy Narcotta-Welp was quoted in the student newspaper as saying: “We’re not going to abandon addressing … inequity, we have to figure out how we’re going to go about addressing that in a different way.” 

And, she said, “While we can’t consider race in someone’s application, that doesn’t change where we go and recruit, that doesn’t change the students that we reach out to and that doesn’t change the programs that we have on our campus.” 

In other words, no matter what, the universities are determined not to change.

The cancer of DEI continues apace. Ultimately elections and legislation are the only way to root out the radicals, by tying compliance to state funding.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed model legislation that focuses on four ways to eliminate DEI: to abolish DEI bureaucracies; to end mandatory diversity training; to curtail “political coercion”; and to eliminate identity-based preferences.

The first is most important. Eliminate the bureaucracies and the programs and DEI can’t survive.

Universities can issue all the DEI statements and all the press release commitments they want, but, as Narcotta-Welp said, it’s the actual programs that count. Cut the bureaucracy and we cut the programs.

The upcoming audit should tell us exactly where those programs are. It will put a well-deserved target on their backs, and we applaud the legislative audit committee for taking this decisive step.