Over the next three days, the Washington Examiner will be running a series called
“Failing Grade: How DEI infected college campuses.”
That we’ve chosen to launch it on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is no coincidence. The very values that King and other civil rights heroes fought for are now at risk thanks to the Left’s DEI agenda, which seeks to replace excellence with radical equalization, equality of opportunity with equity, and true diversity with collectivism.
Critical race theory is just one form of DEI — short for diversity, equity, and inclusion — as is the corporate environmental, social, and governance set of standards now dictating companies’ financial practices. But both ultimately find their roots in academia, where DEI has been at work for years and has the most influence. Indeed, most public universities have entire administrative departments dedicated to
DEI.
These departments consume colleges’ resources and focus. The University of Michigan, for example, will spend
$18 million
this school year on salary and benefits for its DEI personnel. The school’s vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, Rob Sellers, earned $396,550 plus fringe benefits estimated at 32.45% of his salary in 2018. Seventeen other DEI staffers at the university make more than $200,000 per year. The average income for a tenured professor, meanwhile, is $147,000.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
The DEI department’s job on any given campus is to enforce leftist groupthink and draw students into progressive orthodoxy. Even faculty members can’t escape its grasp. Many colleges and universities, for example,
require
current and prospective faculty members to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, often through a written statement. One recent survey by the American Association of University Professors found that one-fifth of American campuses include DEI criteria in their tenure standards, and 19% of schools include a mandatory DEI statement in their job postings, according to the American Enterprise Institute.
Colleges’ focus on DEI has already had its intended effect. As we pointed out in an editorial earlier this month, 78% of students believe
colleges
should provide a space where they can be safe from “harmful” speech, according to a poll, and 1 in 4 say schools should restrict political views that are “upsetting or offensive” to certain groups. They are hostile not just toward ideas that differ from their own but also toward the freedoms that protect those ideas. They see America not as an imperfect experiment in self-governance that deserves our respect and protection but as a problem that must be uprooted.
And make no mistake: The students who think this way will bring their ideas with them into government offices, corporate boardrooms, public school classrooms, and wherever else they end up. That’s the entire point of the Left’s DEI agenda. They hope to transform America from the inside out, to tear down her institutions by hijacking them.
We plan to share some of the most egregious examples of the DEI rot in universities across the country, including in graduate programs and
medical schools.
We hope these stories will make you realize the seriousness of this issue and why it’s so important that our government leaders act with urgency to address it.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S ‘FAILING GRADE’ SERIES
