DEI is dead! Long live DEI!
In a promising shift, both MIT and Harvard University have (for now) publicly abandoned the requirement that job applicants submit loathsome “diversity statements” as part of a job application. According to no less of an authority than the New York Times, this could be “The End for Mandatory D.E.I. Statements.”
“The switch has flipped as of now,” said Jeffrey S. Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. Many professors on hiring committees, he said, may have been reluctant to voice their concerns about mandatory diversity statements before now. “But I think the large, silent majority of faculty who question the implementation of these programs and, in particular, these diversity statements — these people are being heard.”
The University of California system was the first to require diversity statements, starting about a decade ago. To supporters of the requirement, such statements were necessary if colleges wanted to build a welcoming environment for a diverse student population.
Today, some universities use the statements early on in the hiring process, to screen applicants before they are even granted an interview. Others consider the statements later, as applicants reach the final rounds.
Further down the prestige ladder, at public colleges in Republican-controlled states, a similar shift is taking place. In these states, the push is coming from Republican lawmakers, who have belatedly recognized that DEI is a hiring program for people who hate them. In some states, lawmakers have ordered universities to abolish diversity statements, but the most on-the-ball initiatives have made sure to actually fire DEI staffers and shut down their departments. At the University of Texas-Austin, forty people lost their jobs after the school’s DEI office got the axe. At the University of Florida, officials fired 13 administrators in response to a DEI ban.
The signs are all promising, to say the least. But a crucial question remains: Will all of this work?
We can hope, of course. Harvard and MIT are both trendsetters for the schools just below them on the prestige ladder. Odds are good that, at least at America’s top schools and any public college in a red state, much-hated “diversity statements” will soon be a thing of the past.
But don’t get too thrilled just yet. Abolishing diversity statements is not the same thing as abolishing the diversity cult itself. The situation in academia is improving in some respects, but for now it remains a matter of tiny marginal improvements to a vast, utterly rotten edifice. The state of affairs in academia today is such that broad swathes of entire disciplines—not just fake DEI disciplines—have become utterly corroded by DEI.
The triumphalism over vanishing diversity statements operates on the assumption that said statements are a primary driver of anti-white and anti-male discrimination in academia. In reality, though, these statements are simply the product of a DEI-obsessed culture that exists on a deeper level. Mandatory statements during the hiring process make it easier and smoother to reject white male applicants, but the intent to reject them as often as possible was there long before. This discriminatory intent means that DEI (or woke, or race communist, pick your term of choice) priorities now pervade almost every aspect of the academic sausage-making process—to a degree that would shock most Americans. Unless this process is reformed (or, more likely, torn out at the root and replaced), universities will continue their downward spiral toward useless mediocrity.
Let’s take a look beneath the hood.
Walsh himself deserves little sympathy. He himself chose to specialize in a fake DEI-motivated field studying the “far right,” “white supremacy,” and similar politicized garbage. In fact, Walsh’s DEI colleagues were scandalized that he, a white man, would dare complain about his difficulty finding a job in academia. The very act of a white man complaining would seem, at the very least, adjacent to racism. Walsh, being the good obedient dog that he is, apologized profusely to his colleagues for complaining about his inability to get a job and deleted the offending thread. When some right-wing veterans of academia reached out to offer support, Walsh published some of their private messages and then issued hysterical denunciations, in a sad attempt to regain favor with the same leftists who made his life a failed disaster in the first place.
Still, the sorry figure of Walsh merits comment and further explanation. Because while Walsh’s follow-up was pathetic, his original statement was true: He almost certainly really is being rejected in favor of less qualified diversity hires, over and over again. The ironic thing is that in the case of academic researchers of the “far right,” we welcome more qualified people like Walsh being passed over for jobs in favor of less qualified women and minorities—antagonistic joke fields should have the least qualified people possible! But we digress.
Look around, and academics admit the impact of affirmative action all the time. Here is an academic admitting that from 2020 to 2023, approximately 90 percent of faculty hires were done through a re-named DEI program.
