The retreat of DEI may be one of the biggest political and cultural reversals in recent history. Corporate America is running from its DEI trainings and programs in droves. Wall Street has soured on it. Many states, and now the federal government, have declared war on it. And many ordinary Americans are tired of it.
Yet the rot of DEI goes deeper than most people know, and it still has a veneer of respectability in academia. Of course, university administrators are running for the hills when it comes to publicly talking about DEI in the face of mounting legal and political challenges. But they haven’t changed their minds on the issue. They are busily at work rebranding DEI offices and positions as quickly as they can.
DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education does just what the title promises: it exposes DEI for the con game it is. Dr. Stanley Ridgley has written a scathing criticism of DEI in higher education. This book is not for the faint of heart and will persuade no DEI enthusiasts or sympathizers. Ridgley’s contempt for DEI offices, publications, platitudes, and practitioners is palpable.
The initial chapters explain how professional scammers exploit the psychology that makes “marks” susceptible to being conned out of huge sums of money. He quotes Road Hustler on the formula for cons and scams:
finding a suitable victim
gaining the victim’s trust
persuading the victim to commit to a scheme that will benefit him or her
getting money from the victim
finally, placating the victim in order to quell any uneasy feelings about the situation
He argues that paid DEI advocates use this exact formula. These grifters have found easy “marks” in the bleeding hearts of insecure university administrators and faculty who were more than happy to use other people’s money (mostly students’ and taxpayers’) to assuage their consciences and to polish their virtue-signaling bona fides.
Ridgley brings plenty of examples to bear. The most prominent DEI advocates sign million-dollar book deals and charge tens of thousands of dollars per speaking engagement. The run-of-the-mill DEI university official — nearly always with a six-figure salary — can sometimes have close to a half million-dollar compensation scheme going. Undoubtedly, significant amounts of money have been transferred from universities to DEI grifters.
Ridgley points out the egregious case of the University of Michigan.
From the launch of its DEI programs in 2016, UM has spent a mind-numbing two hundred and fifty million dollars on its diversity programs, according to an expose by the New York Times Magazine. Although UM may be the most prominent example of DEI grift, there are plenty of other shocking examples. “UVA pays more than $1 million in salary and benefits to its top two DEI sinecures….By comparison, Virginia’s governor Glenn Youngkin is paid $175,000.” (emphasis original). At Ohio State, over thirty DEI positions were paid between $100,000 and $300,000. To add insult to injury, Ridgley goes into what these universities get from their highly paid DEI bureaucrats: zilch and a headache to go with it.
Despite abusing the phrase “do the work” and claiming to be “exhausted” from their crusade to root out racism, sexism, ableism, and any other -ism du jour, DEI officials are quite cagey about what they do or how their work should be assessed. In fact, many are critical of work itself. Ridgley quotes a volume about Chief Diversity Officers in Higher Education about how they see work.
Here are a few gems:
We choose not to subscribe to the societal and academic pressure that says your value is in your production. Rather we remind each other that we are valuable just as we are, and we can redefine productivity in a holistic way that acknowledges contribution beyond publication and material output.
“We’ve done so by acknowledging our ‘whole” self and redefining productivity.”
Hence, our renewed sense of urgency in changing what contribution to the work and productivity looks like for practitioners. We are continuously constructing and fostering spaces that empower others to embrace their authentic selves. However, it is rare to encounter individuals intentionally creating similar spaces for us as professionals. Organizations such as the Nap Ministry, is an example of how many Black professionals are creating spaces for respite and self-care amidst being overworked and overextended. The Nap Ministry creates ‘sacred spaces where the liberatory, restorative, and disruptive power of rest can take hold.’
I had my doubts about the whole “Nap Ministry” and its leader, the “Nap Bishop.” Surely this must be made-up hyperbole. But these are, in fact, real. Author and consultant Tricia Hersey does, in fact, have a website that markets her Nap Ministry and she does, in fact, refer to herself as the Nap Bishop.
Nor does this appear to be only a fringe isolated internet crank. Apparently, she finds plenty of interest in her work. She writes about taking a two month “Sabbatical” in 2024 to rest from her apparently busy schedule:
(in 2023 I had 30 bookings, flew close to 100,000 airline miles, boarded 26 round trip flights. I lectured in Amsterdam and participated in a theater festival in Melbourne, Australia, was in residency as a scholar-artist at NYU for the Fall 2023 semester) (Italics original)
Sounds a bit like my and a few of my colleagues’ travel schedules — but with a lot more money and, apparently, sabbaticals, as well as quite a bit of napping. Her mantra “rest is resistance” and the successful grift of Tricia Hersey highlights yet another danger of the prevalence of DEI ideology and its practitioners: deep anti-intellectualism.
The reactionary nature of DEI and critical race theory against western civilization includes rejecting logic and reason. Instead of these, DEI advocates highlight psychological, emotional, and mystical experiences. They even created their own “academic” genres of “Testimonios” and “autoethnography.” These genres elevate one’s personal experiences, impressions, and musings to the level of “scholarship,” of truth even. Yet besides being deeply subjective (and thereby highly susceptible to confirmation bias), these methods also facilitate pure fabrication.
Part of DEI’s self-defense mechanism when they are called out for race-baiting and hate crime hoaxes, is that such things could have been true. Therefore, their reaction as if these things were true and did in fact happen, are justified. Such an approach, besides being deeply anti-intellectual, turns out to also be quite costly.
Duke University ended up paying out $20 million dollars apiece to three of its lacrosse players who were accused of raping a dancer. At the time of the allegations, Duke didn’t even attempt an investigation but immediately condemned the students and sided with the accuser based upon racial and social characteristics. Besides being exonerated by DNA evidence, the accuser admitted just last year that she had made up the accusation.
In another prominent case, an employee at a local bakery ran after a minority student from Oberlin College who shoplifted something from the bakery. Two of the shoplifter’s friends helped the shoplifter “pummel the clerk protecting his business” and were all arrested. Oberlin, however, instead of apologizing to the Bakery, immediately took the side of the minority students and accused the Bakery and its employees of rank racism and hate. These accusations led to years of protests, boycotts, threats, and other unpleasantness. Oberlin College eventually had to pay $36.6 million to that local bakery.
DEI programs consist primarily of grifters who do little. They encourage a “virtuous victimhood” mentality in students, they attempt to re-educate those who are not part of the program, and they fail to address real abuse – especially antisemitism. The failure of the DEI establishment to protect Jewish students from threats and abuse over the past year and a half led directly to the removal of three ivy league presidents. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Universities have begun a winnowing process that will likely continue for the next few years. Let’s hope the wheat of academic inquiry and excellence make it through while the chaff of DEI grifters and sinecures blow away with the winds of social and political common sense. Ridley applies an apt quote from GK Chesterton to explain what is wrong with the DEI mindset and to counsel a better way forward:
Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? … How much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if yourself could become smaller in it; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.