DEI

Minouche Shafik has reigned as president of Columbia University. Culture wars, like the kind involving actual armies, have casualties. Shafik is the fourth Ivy League president to step down in the last nine months. She was proceeded by Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay at Harvard. Magill and Gay were casualties of their hapless testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on December 5 and, in Gay’s case, the subsequent revelations about her serial plagiarism. She was also proceeded by Martha Pollack, president of Cornell University, who hung up her mortar board in June, without an assist from the House committee but citing the “enormous, unexpected challenges” of having to deal with antisemitism and Islamophobia.

One of the key critiques of DEI — the identity-based preference system better known as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — is that it places workers in professional positions they’re clearly unqualified for. Often with devastating outcomes. Boeing, for instance, has been accused of favoring race and gender when hiring for its factory floor — factories that have turned out airplanes that have literally fallen from the skies. Disney, too, has seen its quest for race- and gender- and sexuality-based inclusiveness come at a cost — a steep slide in its stock price.  But no area of public life has been more fully infiltrated by DEI than the academy — and the results have been disastrously on display since the Hamas attack against Israel nearly seven months ago.

“This is not a decision I came to easily,” wrote disgraced former Harvard University President Claudine Gay of her resignation just after New Years. That might be the only honest thing Gay has said about the debilitating scandal in which she has devastated her once-prestigious institution over the past three months. Indeed, her decision to resign did not come easily at all. It only came after Gay repeatedly failed to state, including in Congressional testimony, and in the wake of the deadliest anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust, that calling for the genocidal murder of members of her university community is a violation of its code of conduct.

One of the most important political developments of 2023 was the growing pushback against “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Those DEI programs and the ideology that underpin them are under siege politically and legally, and they are losing. They had grown rapidly, thanks to a mixture of support, indifference and timidity. But that began to ebb last year and will continue to recede in 2024. The wounded patient was wheeled into the intensive care unit when the Supreme Court undermined a crucial foundation for DEI and related affirmative action programs. The decision came in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a similar case against the University of North Carolina.

History sometimes rhymes. You can’t expect things to work out the same way every time. But sometimes events are so nearly opposite each other it is as though they rhyme, like hired and fired, acclaim and blame, or adore and deplore. The names “Claudine Gay” and “Scott Gerber” don’t have that phonetic somersault, but they rhyme the other way: nearly simultaneous events that are perfect opposites.  Before I get to that, let me return to, “History sometimes rhymes.” Many readers will recognize that as a paltry paraphrase of Mark Twain’s comment, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” Those readers would be wrong because Twain never said this.

To start a fire, you need a match, something that burns and air. So to speak. If you don’t have a match, you can use flint, but that takes patience and skill. What you burn should have a low combustion point. And the air should have sufficient oxygen. Starting a fire, like starting anything, has predicates: the things you need before you can truly started. But when it comes to education, some people believe we can go directly to the steak sizzling on the grill, never mind the preliminaries. This hastiness never works out very well. The latest example is the slow death of “balanced literacy.” That’s the approach to teaching children how to read that was championed by Professor Lucy Calkins, from her perch at Columbia University’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.

Conservatives just discovered the surest cure for America’s obesity epidemic: boycotts.  On Tuesday morning, Chick-fil-A became the latest casualty in the Bud Light War when a Twitter mob began calling for a boycott of the fast food chain gone “woke.” The outrage followed a viral tweet highlighting that the company had hired a vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. “We have a problem,” tweeted conservative commentator Joey Mannarino on Monday. “Chick-Fil-A just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. This is bad. Very bad. I don’t want to have to boycott. Are we going to have to boycott?” Cockburn certainly does not want to give up his weekly chicken sandwich!