Students need to feel a sense of belonging. In fact, we all do, but for elementary and secondary school students especially, a feeling of belonging to a group with whom they spend the majority of their waking hours can mean the difference between academic success or failure. That’s why students who are bullied or ostracized tend to do worse academically than their peers.
But how about at the collegiate level? Should fostering a sense of belonging really be a priority for college administrators, or does it lean too far toward coddling young adults who at this point should be more independent?
That depends. There’s no question community is important, but it’s been distorted on today’s college campuses to mean something it isn’t. Instead of encouraging young adults to invest in groups and relationships that will challenge them and help them grow, so-called education experts and administrators have created campus cultures in which groupthink reigns supreme. Students must accept the prescribed leftist values or risk being accused of intolerance and bigotry.
Hanover Research’s Dr. Amy Kurfist admitted that creating a sense of personal attachment and “belonging” to this woke campus culture is the next frontier in the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that have taken over campuses across America.
According to
Kurfist, “it is imperative for colleges and universities to shift more focus to inclusion and belonging, even as they continue other DEI efforts.”
Imperative? The college years used to be a time for young adults to hone their critical thinking skills as they prepared to take their places in the real world, where very few will care about their “sense of belonging.” The focus on the social constructs of
DEI
on college campuses does students no favors and leaves them woefully ill-equipped for life after academia. Rather than empowering students, DEI weakens them, which is, in fact, its unspoken goal.
The same people who insist that 12-year-olds be allowed to decide their own gender tell us that 20-year-olds must be protected from microaggressions, perceived racist slights, and exclusion. But ask them how they feel about the inclusion of, say, members of the campus Republican club, and they wither.
Although it feels like DEI has exploded onto college campuses and into U.S. corporations in just the past few years, it’s actually been incubating inside America’s most elite
universities
for decades. Its adverse effects are already being felt in the rest of society. As these students graduate and take their places in the real world, they bring their distorted worldviews and unrealistic expectations about humanity with them. This puts them at a serious disadvantage to those educated in more traditional school systems that are based on merit, discipline, and academic rigor. Abandoning these traditional values will result in a weaker, less influential, less respected America and, by extension, a far more dangerous world.
The prioritization of DEI on U.S. college campuses has become a big business — and a lucrative one. The
American Enterprise Institute
discovered that the incomes of DEI employees often exceed those of fully tenured professors at the same universities. For example, the University of Michigan’s Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer Rob Sellers earned $396,550 plus fringe benefits estimated at 32.45% of salary in 2018. The average annual income for a tenured professor at the school that year? $147,000.
Moreover, the race to staff already bloated college administrations with DEI personnel has driven administration-to-student ratios to levels unheard of just a decade ago. The current ratio of administrator to student for Yale University undergraduates is
1 to 1
. Predictably, the salaries of this new class of employees are causing college tuition to surge to prohibitive levels.
Following a 2021 study, the
Heritage Foundation
concluded that DEI has “become a primary function of higher education.” Worse still, they found that these efforts “have little relationship to students’ satisfaction with their college or their personal experiences with diversity.”
Disturbingly, they learned that “the DEI bureaucracies are often larger than the faculty of the largest academic department on a campus.” They cite Georgia Tech, where DEI employees outnumber faculty members of the history department by a ratio of 3 to 1. The study found that at Syracuse University, there is 7.4 DEI personnel for every 100 faculty members.
So, what are universities getting for their money? Well, not much if you ask Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Jay Greene. He
told
Fox News that while the “ostensible objective” of DEI is to make “college campuses more welcoming and inclusive,” its real purpose “is to create a political orthodoxy and enforce that political orthodoxy, which fundamentally distorts the intellectual and political life on campus.”
In a separate essay, Greene
explained
: “DEI takes a bunch of good words and in Orwellian fashion, uses them to advance the very opposite of what those words mean. … DEI classifies us as either oppressor or oppressed, with the former deserving whatever harsh consequences they might get while the latter is entitled to whatever benefits they can grab.”
At its core, DEI is a
Marxist
tool used by the Left to advance their radical agenda. And sadly, this toxic ideology is sweeping through our universities at breakneck speed.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the
Washington Examiner
and the
Western Journal
. Her articles have appeared at MSN, RedState, Newsmax, the Federalist, and RealClearPolitics. Follow her on
Twitter
or
LinkedIn
.
