During the final years of the Obama administration, I was teaching at a large private university where the nascent “great awokening” had made itself manifest in a few incidents of student protest and unrest. There was never a major blowup of the sort seen around the same time at colleges from Yale to Evergreen to the University of Missouri. Nonetheless, administrators felt the need to “do something.”
A task force on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” was duly convened to figure out exactly what. One of this committee’s major moves was to contract a consulting firm to conduct a “climate assessment” of the entire institution. In effect, this was a long online survey that all employees and students were encouraged, cajoled, and bribed (with pizza and the like) into filling out over the course of some months. The survey asked respondents to translate their feelings of comfort and discomfort within the institution into a series of numerical ratings. The consultants then synthesized the resulting data into a public presentation; this glorified PowerPoint was ceremoniously presented as the crowning achievement of the DEI task force — soon after which it was summarily disbanded.
